as I took big gulps of air. I was
veritably choking. Peals of laughter came out of him, like ocean waves. I
forcefully pulled away and walked toward the plaza. He followed me.
"I never imagined you were going to get so upset," he said, as new
waves of laughter shook his body.
"Why didn't you tell me that the tenant is a woman?"
"That sorcerer in there is the death defier," he said solemnly. "For
such a sorcerer, so versed in the shifts of the assemblage point, to be a
man or a woman is a matter of choice or convenience. This is the first part
of the lesson in dreaming I said you were going to get. And the death defier
is the mysterious visitor who's going to guide you through it."
He held his sides as laughter made him cough. I was speechless. Then a
sudden fury possessed me. I was not mad at don Juan or myself or anyone in
particular. It was a cold fury, which made me feel as if my chest and all my
neck muscles were going to explode.
"Let's go back to the church," I shouted, and I didn't recognize my own
voice.
"Now, now," he said softly. "You don't have to jump into the fire just
like that. Think. Deliberate. Measure things up. Cool that mind of yours.
Never in your life have you been put to such a test. You need calmness now.
"I can't tell you what to do," he continued. "I can only, like any
other nagual, put you in front of your challenge, after telling you, in
quite oblique terms, everything that is pertinent. This is another of the
nagual's maneuvers: to say everything without saying it or to ask without
asking."
I wanted to get it over with quickly. But don Juan said that a moment's
pause would restore whatever was left of my self-assurance. My knees were
about to give in. Solicitously, don Juan made me sit down on the curb. He
sat next to me.
"The first part of the dreaming lesson in question is that maleness and
femaleness are not final states but are the result of a specific act of
positioning the assemblage point," he said. "And this act is, naturally, a
matter of volition and training. Since it was a subject close to the old
sorcerers' hearts, they are the only ones who can shed light on it."
Perhaps because it was the only rational thing to do, I began to argue
with don Juan. "I can't accept or believe what you are saying," I said. I
felt heat rising to my face.
"But you saw the woman," don Juan retorted. "Do you think that all of
this is a trick?"
"I don't know what to think."
"That being in the church is a real woman," he said forcefully. "Why
should that be so disturbing to you? The fact that she was born a man
attests only to the power of the old sorcerers' machinations. This shouldn't
surprise you. You have already embodied all the principles of sorcery."
My insides were about to burst with tension. In an accusing tone, don
Juan said that I was just being argumentative. With forced patience but real
pomposity, I explained to him the biological foundation of maleness and
femaleness.
"I understand all that," he said. "And you're right in what you're
saying. Your flaw is to try to make your assessments universal."
"What we're talking about are basic principles," I shouted. "They'll be
pertinent to man here or in any other place in the universe."
"True. True," he said in a quiet voice. "Everything you say is true as
long as our assemblage point remains on its habitual position. But the
moment it is displaced beyond certain boundaries and our daily world is no
longer in function, none of the principles you cherish has the total value
you're talking about.
"Your mistake is to forget that the death defier has transcended those
boundaries thousands upon thousands of times. It doesn't take a genius to
realize that the tenant is no longer bound by the same forces that bind you
now."
I told him that my quarrel, if it could be called a quarrel, was not
with him but with accepting the practical side of sorcery, which, up to that
moment, had been so farfetched that it had never posed a real problem to me.
I reiterated that, as a dreamer, it was within my experience to attest that
in dreaming anything is possible. I reminded him that he himself had
sponsored and cultivated this conviction, together with the ultimate
necessity for soundness of mind. What he was proposing as the tenant's case
was not sane. It was a subject only for dreaming, certainly not for the
daily world. I let him know that to me it was an abhorrent and untenable
proposition.
"Why this violent reaction?" he asked with a smile.
His question caught me off guard. I felt embarrassed. "I think it
threatens me at the core," I admitted. And I meant it. To think that the
woman in the church was a man was somehow nauseating to me.
A thought played in my mind: perhaps the tenant is a transvestite. I
queried don Juan, in earnest, about this possibility. He laughed so hard he
seemed about to get ill.
"That's too mundane a possibility," he said. "Maybe your old friends
would do such a thing. Your new ones are more resourceful and less
masturbatory. I repeat. That being in the church is a woman. It is a she.
And she has all the organs and attributes of a female." He smiled
maliciously "You've always been attracted to women, haven't you? It seems
that this situation has been tailored just for you."
His mirth was so intense and childlike that it was contagious. We both
laughed. He, with total abandon. I, with total apprehension.
I came to a decision then. I stood up and said out loud that I had no
desire to deal with the tenant in any form or shape. My choice was to bypass
all this business and go back to don Juan's house and then home.
Don Juan said that my decision was perfectly all right with him, and we
started back to his house. My thoughts raced wildly. Am I doing the right
thing? Am I running away out of fear? Of course, I immediately rationalized
my decision as the right and unavoidable one. After all, I assured myself, I
was not interested in acquisitions, and the tenant's gifts were like
acquiring property. Then doubt and curiosity hit me. There were so many
questions I could have asked the death defier.
My heart began to pound so intensely I felt it beating against my
stomach. The pounding suddenly changed into the emissary's voice. It broke
its promise not to interfere and said that an incredible force was
accelerating my heart beat in order to drive me back to the church; to walk
toward don Juan's house was to walk toward my death.
I stopped walking and hurriedly confronted don Juan with the emissary's
words. "Is this true?" I asked.
"I am afraid it is," he admitted sheepishly.
"Why didn't you tell me yourself, don Juan? Were you going to let me
die because you think I am a coward?" I asked in a furious mood.
"You were not going to die just like that. Your energy body has endless
resources. And it had never occurred to me to think you're a coward. I
respect your decisions, and I don't give a damn about what motivates them.
"You are at the end of the road, just like me. So be a true nagual.
Don't be ashamed of what you are. If you were a coward, I think you would
have died of fright years ago. But if you're too afraid to meet the death
defier, then die rather than face him. There is no shame in that."
"Let's go back to the church," I said, as calmly as I could. "Now we're
getting to the crux of the matter!" don Juan exclaimed. "But first, let's go
back to the park and sit down on a bench and carefully consider your
options. We can spare the time; besides, it's too early for the business at
hand."
We walked back to the park and immediately found an unoccupied bench
and sat down.
"You have to understand that only you, yourself, can make the decision
to meet or not to meet the tenant or to accept or reject his gifts of
power," don Juan said. "But your decision has to be voiced to the woman in
the church, face to face and alone; otherwise it won't be valid."
Don Juan said that the tenant's gifts were extraordinary but that the
price for them was tremendous. And that he himself did not approve of
either, the gifts or the price.
"Before you make your real decision," don Juan continued, "you have to
know all the details of our transactions with that sorcerer."
"I'd rather not hear about this anymore, don Juan," I pleaded.
"It's your duty to know," he said. "How else are you going to make up
your mind?"
"Don't you think that the less I know about the tenant the better off
I'll be?"
"No. This is not a matter of hiding until the danger is over. This is
the moment of truth. Everything you've done and experienced in the
sorcerers' world has channeled you to this spot. I didn't want to say it,
because I knew your energy body was going to tell you, but there is no way
to get out of this appointment. Not even by dying. Do you understand?" He
shook me by the shoulders. "Do you understand?" he repeated.
I understood so well that I asked him if it would be possible for him
to make me change levels of awareness in order to alleviate my fear and
discomfort. He nearly made me jump with the explosion of his no.
"You must face the death defier in coldness and with ultimate
premeditation," he went on. "And you can't do this by proxy."
Don Juan calmly began to repeat everything he had already told me about
the death defier. As he talked, I realized that part of my confusion was the
result of his use of words. He rendered "death defier" in Spanish as el
desafiante de la muerte, and "tenant" as el inquilino, both of which
automatically denote a male. But in describing the relationship between the
tenant and the naguals of his line, don Juan kept on mixing the
Spanish-language male and female gender denotation, creating a great
confusion in me.
He said that the tenant was supposed to pay for the energy he took from
the naguals of our lineage, but that whatever he paid has bound those
sorcerers for generations. As payment for the energy taken from all those
naguals, the woman in the church taught them exactly what to do to displace
their assemblage point to some specific positions, which she herself had
chosen. In other words, she bound every one of those men with a gift of
power consisting of a preselected, specific position of the assemblage point
and all its implications. "What do you mean by 'all its implications,' don
Juan?"
"I mean the negative results of those gifts. The woman in the church
knows only of indulging. There is no frugality, no temperance in that woman.
For instance, she taught the nagual Julian how to arrange his assemblage
point to be, just like her, a woman. Teaching this to my benefactor, who was
an incurable voluptuary, was like giving booze to a drunkard."
"But isn't it up to each one of us to be responsible for what we do?"
"Yes, indeed. However, some of us have more difficulty than others in
being responsible. To augment that difficulty deliberately, as that woman
does, is to put too much unnecessary pressure on us."
"How do you know the woman in the church does this deliberately?"
"She has done it to every one of the naguals of my line. If we look at
ourselves fairly and squarely, we have to admit that the death defier has
made us, with his gifts, into a line of very indulging, dependent
sorcerers."
I could not overlook his inconsistency of language usage any longer,
and I complained to him. "You have to speak about that sorcerer as either a
male or a female, but not as both," I said harshly. "I'm too stiff, and your
arbitrary use of gender makes me all the more uneasy."
"I am very uneasy myself," he confessed. "But the truth is that the
death defier is both: male and female. I've never been able to take that
sorcerer's change with grace. I was sure you would feel the same way, having
seen him as a man first."
Don Juan reminded me of a time, years before, when he took me to meet
the death defier and I met a man, a strange Indian who was not old but not
young either and was very slightly built. I remember mostly his strange
accent and his use of one odd metaphor when describing things he allegedly
had seen. He said, mis ojos se pasearon, my eyes walked on. For instance, he
said, "My eyes walked on the helmets of the Spanish conquerors."
The event was so fleeting in my mind that I had always thought the
meeting had lasted only a few minutes. Don Juan later told me that I had
been gone with the death defier for a whole day.
"The reason I was trying to find out from you earlier whether you knew
what was going on," don Juan continued, "was because I thought that years
ago you had made an appointment with the death defier yourself."
"You were giving me undue credit, don Juan. In this instance, I really
don't know whether I am coming or going. But what gave you the idea that I
knew?"
"The death defier seemed to have taken a liking to you. And that meant
to me that he might have already given you a gift of power, although you
didn't remember it. Or he might have set up your appointment with him, as a
woman. I even suspected she had given you precise directions."
Don Juan remarked that the death defier, being definitely a creature of
ritual habits, always met the naguals of his line first as a man, as it had
happened with the nagual Sebastian, and subsequently as a woman.
"Why do you call the death defier's gifts, gifts of power? And why the
mystery?" I asked. "You yourself can displace your assemblage point to
whatever spot you want, isn't that so?"
"They are called gifts of power because they are products of the
specialized knowledge of the sorcerers of antiquity," he said. "The mystery
about the gifts is that no one on this earth, with the exception of the
death defier, can give us a sample of that knowledge. And, of course, I can
displace my assemblage point to whatever spot I want, inside or outside
man's energy shape. But what I can't do, and only the death defier can, is
to know what to do with my energy body in each one of those spots in order
to get total perception, total cohesion."
He explained, then, that modern-day sorcerers do not know the details
of the thousands upon thousands of possible positions of the assemblage
point.
"What do you mean by details?" I asked.
"Particular ways of treating the energy body in order to maintain the
assemblage point fixed on specific positions," he replied.
He took himself as an example. He said that the death defier's gift of
power to him had been the position of the assemblage point of a crow and the
procedures to manipulate his energy body to get the total perception of a
crow. Don Juan explained that total perception, total cohesion was what the
old sorcerers sought at any cost, and that, in the case of his own gift of
power, total perception came to him by means of a deliberate process he had
to learn, step by step, as one learns to work a very complex machine.
Don Juan further explained that most of the shifts modern-day sorcerers
experience are mild shifts within a thin bundle of energetic luminous
filaments inside the luminous egg, a bundle called the band of man, or the
purely human aspect of the universe's energy. Beyond that band, but still
within the luminous egg, lies the realm of the grand shifts. When the
assemblage point shifts to any spot on that area, perception is still
comprehensible to us, but extremely detailed procedures are required for
perception to be total.
"The inorganic beings tricked you and Carol Tiggs in your last journey
by helping you two to get total cohesion on a grand shift," don Juan said.
"They displaced your assemblage points to the farthest possible spot, then
helped you perceive there as if you were in your daily world. A nearly
impossible thing. To do that type of perceiving a sorcerer needs pragmatic
knowledge, or influential friends.
"Your friends would have betrayed you in the end and left you and Carol
to fend for yourselves and learn pragmatic measures in order to survive in
that world. You two would have ended filled to the brim with pragmatic
procedures, just like those most knowledgeable old sorcerers. "Every grand
shift has different inner workings," he continued, "which modern sorcerers
could learn if they knew how to fixate the assemblage point long enough at
any grand shift. Only the sorcerers of ancient times had the specific
knowledge required to do this."
Don Juan went on to say that the knowledge of specific procedures
involved in shifts was not available to the eight naguals who preceded the
nagual Sebastian, and that the tenant showed the nagual Sebastian how to
achieve total perception on ten new positions of the assemblage point. The
nagual Santisteban received seven, the nagual Lujan fifty, the nagual
Rosendo six, the nagual Elias four, the nagual Julian sixteen, and he was
shown two; that made a total of ninety-five specific positions of the
assemblage point that his lineage knew about. He said that if I asked him
whether he considered this an advantage to his lineage, he would have to say
no, because the weight of those gifts put them closer to the old sorcerers'
mood.
"Now it's your turn to meet the tenant," he continued. "Perhaps the
gifts he will give you will offset our total balance and our lineage will
plunge into the darkness that finished off the old sorcerers."
"This is so horribly serious, it's sickening," I said. "I most
sincerely sympathize with you," he retorted with a serious expression. "I
know it's no consolation to you if I say that this is the toughest trial of
a modern nagual. To face something so old and mysterious as the tenant is
not awe-inspiring but revolting. At least it was to me, and still is."
"Why do I have to continue with it, don Juan?"
"Because, without knowing it, you accepted the death defier challenge.
I drew an acceptance from you in the course of your apprenticeship, in the
same manner my teacher drew one from me, surreptitiously.
"I went through the same horror, only a little more brutally than you."
He began to chuckle. "The nagual Julian was given to playing horrendous
jokes. He told me that there was a very beautiful and passionate widow who
was madly in love with me. The nagual used to take me to church often, and I
had seen the woman staring at me. I thought she was a good-looking woman.
And I was a horny young man. When the nagual said that she liked me, I fell
for it. My awakening was very rude."
I had to fight not to laugh at don Juan's gesture of lost innocence.
Then the idea of his predicament hit me, as being not funny but ghastly.
"Are you sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I asked,
hoping that perhaps it was a mistake or a bad joke.
"I am very, very sure," he said. "Besides, even if I were so dumb as to
forget the tenant, my seeing can't fail me."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that the tenant has a different type of
energy?"
"No, not a different type of energy, but certainly different energy
features than a normal person."
"Are you absolutely sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I
insisted, driven by a strange revulsion and fear.
"That woman is the tenant!" don Juan exclaimed in a voice that admitted
no doubts.
We remained quiet. I waited for the next move in the midst of a panic
beyond description.
"I have already said to you that to be a natural man or a natural woman
is a matter of positioning the assemblage point," don Juan said. "By natural
I mean someone who was born either male or female. To a seer, the shiniest
part of the assemblage point faces outward, in the case of females and
inward, in the case of males. The tenant's assemblage point was originally
facing inward, but he changed it by twisting it around and making his
egglike energy shape look like a shell that has curled up on itself."
12. THE WOMAN IN THE CHURCH
Don Juan and I sat in silence. I had run out of questions, and he
seemed to have said to me all that was pertinent. It could not have been
more than seven o'clock, but the plaza was unusually deserted. It was a warm
night. In the evenings, in that town, people usually meandered around the
plaza until ten or eleven.
I took a moment to reconsider what was happening to me. My time with
don Juan was coming to an end. He and his party were going to fulfill the
sorcerers' dream of leaving this world and entering into inconceivable
dimensions. On this basis of my limited success in dreaming, I believed that
the claims were not illusory but extremely sober, although contrary to
reason. They were seeking to perceive the unknown, and they had made it.
Don Juan was right in saying that, by inducing a systematic
displacement of the assemblage point, dreaming liberates perception,
enlarging the scope of what can be perceived. For the sorcerers of his
party, dreaming had not only opened the doors of other perceivable worlds
but prepared them for entering into those realms in full awareness.
Dreaming, for them, had become ineffable, unprecedented, something whose
nature and scope could only be alluded to, as when don Juan said that it is
the gateway to the light and to the darkness of the universe.
There was only one thing pending for them: my encounter with the death
defier. I regretted that don Juan had not given me notice so that I could
prepare myself better. But he was a nagual who did everything of importance
on the spur of the moment, without any warning.
For a moment, I seemed to be doing fine, sitting with don Juan in that
park, waiting for things to develop. But then my emotional stability
suffered a downward swing and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was in the
midst of a dark despair. I was assailed by petty considerations about my
safety, my goals, my hopes in the world, my worries. Upon examination,
however, I had to admit that perhaps the only true worry I had was about my
three cohorts in don Juan's world. Yet, if I thought it out, even that was
no real worry to me. Don Juan had taught them to be the kind of sorceresses
who always knew what to do, and, most important, he had prepared them always
to know what to do with what they knew.
Having had all the possible worldly reasons for feeling anguish
stripped off me a long time ago, all I had been left with was concern for
myself. And I gave myself to it shamelessly. One last indulging for the
road: the fear of dying at the hands of the death defier. I became so afraid
that I got sick to my stomach. I tried to apologize, but don Juan laughed.
"You're not in any way unique at barfing out of fear," he said. "When I
met the death defier, I wet my pants. Believe me."
I waited in silence for a long, unbearable moment. "Are you ready?" he
asked. I said yes. And he added, standing up, "Let's go then and find out
how you are going to stand up in the firing line."
He led the way back to the church. To the best of my ability, all I
remember of that walk, to this day, is that he had to drag me bodily the
whole way. I do not remember arriving at the church or entering it. The next
thing I knew, I was kneeling on a long, worn-out wooden pew next to the
woman I had seen earlier. She was smiling at me. Desperately, I looked
around, trying to spot don Juan, but he was nowhere in sight. I would have
flown like a bat out of hell had the woman not restrained me by grabbing my
arm.
"Why should you be so afraid of poor little me?" the woman asked me in
English.
I stayed glued to the spot where I was kneeling. What had taken me
entirely and instantaneously was her voice. I cannot describe what it was
about its raspy sound that called out the most recondite memories in me. It
was as if I had always known that voice.
I remained there immobile, mesmerized by that sound. She asked me
something else in English, but I could not make out what she was saying. She
smiled at me, knowingly. "It's all right," she whispered in Spanish. She was
kneeling to my right. "I understand real fear. I live with it."
I was about to talk to her when I heard the emissary's voice in my ear.
"It's the voice of Hermelinda, your wet nurse," it said. The only thing I
had ever known about Hermelinda was the story I was told of her being
accidentally killed by a runaway truck. That the woman's voice would stir
such deep, old memories was shocking to me. I experienced a momentary
agonizing anxiety. "I am your wet nurse!" the woman exclaimed softly. "How
extraordinary! Do you want my breast?" Laughter convulsed her body.
I made a supreme effort to remain calm, yet I knew that I was quickly
losing ground and in no time at all was going to take leave of my senses.
"Don't mind my joking," the woman said in a low voice. "The truth is
that I like you very much. You are bustling with energy. And we are going to
get along fine."
Two older men knelt down right in front of us. One of them turned
curiously to look at us. She paid no attention to him and kept on whispering
in my ear.
"Let me hold your hand," she pleaded. But her plea was like a command.
I surrendered my hand to her, unable to say no. "Thank you. Thank you for
your confidence and your trust in me," she whispered.
The sound of her voice was driving me mad. Its raspiness was so exotic,
so utterly feminine. Not under any circumstances would I have taken it for a
man's voice laboring to sound womanly. It was a raspy voice, but not a
throaty or harsh-sounding one. It was more like the sound of bare feet
softly walking on gravel.
I made a tremendous effort to break an invisible sheet of energy that
seemed to have enveloped me. I thought I succeeded. I stood up, ready to
leave, and I would have had not the woman also stood up and whispered in my
ear, "Don't run away. There is so much I have to tell you."
I automatically sat down, stopped by curiosity. Strangely, my anxiety
was suddenly gone, and so was my fear. I even had enough presence to ask the
woman, "Are you really a woman?" She chuckled softly, like a young girl.
Then she voiced a convoluted sentence. "If you dare to think that I would
transform myself into a fearsome man and cause you harm, you are gravely
mistaken," she said, accentuating even more that strange, mesmeric voice.
"You are my benefactor. I am your servant, as I have been the servant of all
the naguals who preceded you."
Gathering all the energy I could, I spoke my mind to her. "You are
welcome to my energy," I said. "It's a gift from me to you, but I don't want
any gifts of power from you. And I really mean this."
"I can't take your energy for free," she whispered. "I pay for what I
get, that's the deal. It's foolish to give your energy for free."
"I've been a fool all my life. Believe me," I said. "I can surely
afford to make you a gift. I have no problem with it. You need the energy,
take it. But I don't need to be saddled with unnecessaries. I have nothing
and I love it." "Perhaps," she said pensively.
Aggressively, I asked her whether she meant that perhaps she would take
my energy or that she did not believe I had nothing and loved it.
She giggled with delight and said that she might take my energy since I
was so generously offering it but that she had to make a payment. She had to
give me a thing of similar value.
As I heard her speak, I became aware that she spoke Spanish with a most
extravagant foreign accent. She added an extra phoneme to the middle
syllable of every word. Never in my life had I heard anyone speak like that.
"Your accent is quite extraordinary," I said. "Where is it from?"
"From nearly eternity," she said and sighed. We had begun to connect. I
understood why she sighed. She was the closest thing to permanent, while I
was temporary. That was my advantage. The death defier had worked herself
into a corner, and I was free.
I examined her closely. She seemed to be between thirty-five and forty
years old. She was a dark, thoroughly Indian woman, almost husky, but not
fat or even hefty. I could see that the skin of her forearms and hands was
smooth, the muscles, firm and youthful. I judged that she was five feet, six
or seven inches tall. She wore a long dress, a black shawl, and guaraches.
In her kneeling position, I could also see her smooth heels and part of her
powerful calves. Her midsection was lean. She had big breasts that she could
not or perhaps did not want to hide under her shawl. Her hair was jet black
and tied in a long braid. She was not beautiful, but she was not homely
either. Her features were in no way outstanding. I felt that she could not
possibly have attracted anybody's attention, except for her eyes, which she
kept low, hidden beneath downcast eyelids. Her eyes were magnificent, clear,
peaceful. Apart from don Juan's, I had never seen eyes more brilliant, more
alive.
Her eyes put me completely at ease. Eyes like that could not be
malevolent. I had a surge of trust and optimism and the feeling that I had
known her all my life. But I was also very conscious of something else: my
emotional instability. It had always plagued me in don Juan's world, forcing
me to be like a yo-yo. I had moments of total trust and insight only to be
followed by abject doubts and distrust. This event was not going to be
different. My suspicious mind suddenly came up with the warning thought that
I was falling under the woman's spell.
"You learned Spanish late in life, didn't you?" I said, just to get out
from under my thoughts and to avoid her reading them.
"Only yesterday," she retorted and broke into a crystalline laughter,
her small, strangely white teeth, shining like a row of pearls.
People turned to look at us. I lowered my forehead as if in deep
prayer. The woman moved closer to me. "Is there a place where we could
talk?" I asked. "We are talking here," she said. "I have talked here with
all the naguals of your line. If you whisper, no one will know we are
talking."
I was dying to ask her about her age. But a sobering memory came to my
rescue. I remembered a friend of mine who for years had been setting up all
kinds of traps to make me confess my age to him. I detested his petty
concern, and now I was about to engage in the same behavior. I dropped it
instantly.
I wanted to tell her about it, just to keep the conversation going. She
seemed to know what was going through my mind. She squeezed my arm in a
friendly gesture, as if to say that we had shared a thought.
"Instead of giving me a gift, can you tell me something that would help
me in my way?" I asked her.
She shook her head. "No," she whispered. "We are extremely different.
More different than I believed possible."
She got up and slid sideways out of the pew. She deftly genuflected as
she faced the main altar. She crossed herself and signaled me to follow her
to a large side altar to our left.
We knelt in front of a life-size crucifix. Before I had time to say
anything, she spoke. "I've been alive for a very, very long time," she said.
"The reason I have had this long life is that I control the shifts and
movements of my assemblage point. Also, I don't stay here in your world too
long. I have to save the energy I get from the naguals of your line." "What
is it like to exist in other worlds?" I asked. "It's like in your dreaming,
except that I have more mobility. And I can stay longer anywhere I want.
Just like if you would stay as long as you wanted in any of your dreams."
"When you are in this world, are you pinned down to this area alone?"
"No. I go everywhere I want." "Do you always go as a woman?"
"I've been a woman longer than a man. Definitely, I like it much
better. I think I've nearly forgotten how to be a man. I am all female!"
She took my hand and made me touch her crotch. My heart was pounding in
my throat. She was indeed a female.
"I can't just take your energy," she said, changing the subject. "We
have to strike another kind of agreement."
Another wave of mundane reasoning hit me then. I wanted to ask her
where she lived when she was in this world. I did not need to voice my
question to get an answer.
"You're much, much younger than I," she said, "and you already have
difficulty telling people where you live. And even if you take them to the
house you own or pay rent on, that's not where you live."
"There are so many things I want to ask you, but all I do is think
stupid thoughts," I said.
"You don't need to ask me anything," she went on. "You already know
what I know. All you needed was a jolt in order to claim what you already
know. I am giving you that jolt."
Not only did I think stupid thoughts but I was in a state of such
suggestibility that no sooner had she finished saying that I knew what she
knew than I felt I knew everything, and I no longer needed to ask any more
questions. Laughingly, I told her about my gullibility.
"You're not gullible," she assured me with authority. "You know
everything, because you're now totally in the second attention. Look
around!"
For a moment, I could not focus my sight. It was exactly as if water
had gotten into my eyes. When I arranged my view, I knew that something
portentous had happened. The church was different, darker, more ominous, and
somehow harder. I stood up and took a couple of steps toward the nave. What
caught my eye were the pews; they were made not out of lumber but out of
thin, twisted poles. These were homemade pews, set inside a magnificent
stone building. Also, the light in the church was different. It was
yellowish, and its dim glow cast the blackest shadows I had ever seen. It
came from the candles of the many altars. I had an insight about how well
candlelight mixed with the massive stone walls and ornaments of a colonial
church.
The woman was staring at me; the brightness of her eyes was most
remarkable. I knew then that I was dreaming and she was directing the dream.
But I was not afraid of her or of the dream. I moved away from the side
altar and looked again at the nave of the church. There were people kneeling
in prayer there.
Lots of them, strangely small, dark, hard people. I could see their
bowed heads all the way to the foot of the main altar. The ones who were
close to me stared at me, obviously, in disapproval. I was gaping at them
and at everything else. I could not hear any noise, though. People moved,
but there was no sound.
"I can't hear anything," I said to the woman, and my voice boomed,
echoing as if the church were a hollow shell.
Nearly all the heads turned to look at me. The woman pulled me back
into the darkness of the side altar.
"You will hear if you don't listen with your ears," she said. "Listen
with your dreaming attention."
It appeared that all I needed was her insinuation. I was suddenly
flooded by the droning sound of a multitude in prayer. I was instantly swept
up by it. I found it the most exquisite sound I had ever heard. I wanted to
rave about it to the woman, but she was not by my side. I looked for her.
She had nearly reached the door. She turned there to signal me to follow
her. I caught up with her at the portico. The streetlights were gone. The
only illumination was moonlight. The facade of the church was also
different; it was unfinished. Square blocks of limestone lay everywhere.
There were no houses or buildings around the church. In the moonlight the
scene was eerie.
"Where are we going?" I asked her.
"Nowhere," she replied. "We simply came out here to have more space,
more privacy. Here we can talk our little heads off."
She urged me to sit down on a quarried, half-chiseled piece of
limestone. "The second attention has endless treasures to be discovered,"
she began. "The initial position in which the dreamer places his body is of
key importance. And right there is the secret of the ancient sorcerers, who
were already ancient in my time. Think about it."
She sat so close to me that I felt the heat of her body. She put an arm
around my shoulder and pressed me against her bosom. Her body had a most
peculiar fragrance; it reminded me of trees or sage. It was not that she was
wearing perfume; her whole being seemed to exude that characteristic odor of
pine forests. Also the heat of her body was not like mine or like that of
anyone else I knew. Hers was a cool, mentholated heat, even, balanced. The
thought that came to my mind was that her heat would press on relentlessly
but knew no hurry.
She began then to whisper in my left ear. She said that the gifts she
had given to the naguals of my line had to do with what the old sorcerers
used to call, the twin positions. That is to say, the initial position in
which a dreamer holds his physical body to begin dreaming is mirrored by the
position in which he holds his energy body, in dreams, to fixate his
assemblage point on any spot of his choosing. The two positions make a unit,
she said, and it took the old sorcerers thousands of years to find out the
perfect relationship between any two positions. She commented, with a
giggle, that the sorcerers of today will never have the time or the
disposition to do all that work, and that the men and women of my line were
indeed lucky to have her to give them such gifts. Her laughter had a most
remarkable, crystalline sound.
I had not quite understood her explanation of the twin positions.
Boldly, I told her that I did not want to practice those things but only
know about them as intellectual possibilities. "What exactly do you want to
know?" she asked softly. "Explain to me what you mean by the twin positions,
or the initial position in which a dreamer holds his body to start
dreaming." I said.
"How do you lie down to start your dreaming?" she asked. "Any which
way. I don't have a pattern. Don Juan never stressed this point." "Well, I
do stress it," she said and stood up. She changed positions. She sat down to
my right and whispered in my other ear that, in accordance with what she
knew, the position in which one places the body is of utmost importance. She
proposed a way of testing this by performing an extremely delicate but
simple exercise.
"Start your dreaming by lying on your right side, with your knees a bit
bent," she said. "The discipline is to maintain that position and fall
asleep in it. In dreaming, then, the exercise is to dream that you lie down
in exactly the same position and fall asleep again." "What does that do?" I
asked.
"It makes the assemblage point stay put, and I mean really stay put, in
whatever position it is at the instant of that second falling asleep." "What
are the results of this exercise?" "Total perception. I am sure your
teachers have already told you that my gifts are gifts of total perception."
"Yes. But I think I am not clear about what total perception means," I
lied.
She ignored me and went on to tell me that the four variations of the
exercise were to fall asleep lying on the right side, the left, the back,
and the stomach. Then in dreaming the exercise was to dream of falling
asleep a second time in the same position as the dreaming had been started.
She promised me extraordinary results, which she said were not possible to
foretell.
She abruptly changed the subject and asked me, "What's the gift you