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Carlos Castaneda — "Journey to Ixtlan"
INTRODUCTION
On Saturday, May 22, 1971, I went to Sonora, Mexico, to see don Juan
Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, with whom I had been associated since 1961.
I thought that my visit on that day was going to be in no way different from
the scores of times I had gone to see him in the ten years I had been his
apprentice. The events that took place on that day and on the following
days, however, were momentous to me. On that occasion my apprenticeship came
to an end. This was not an arbitrary withdrawal on my part but a bona fide
termination.
I have already presented the case of my apprenticeship in two previous
works: The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality.
My basic assumption in both books has been that the articulation points
in learning to be a sorcerer were the states of non-ordinary reality
produced by the ingestion of psychotropic plants.
In this respect don Juan was an expert in the use of three such plants:
Datura inoxia, commonly known as jimson weed; Lofihophora williamsii, known
as peyote; and a hallucinogenic mushroom of the genus Psilocybe.
My perception of the world through the effects of those psychotropics
had been so bizarre and impressive that I was forced to assume that such
states were the only avenue to communicating and learning what don Juan was
attempting to teach me. That assumption was erroneous.
For the purposes of avoiding any misunderstandings about my work with
don Juan I would like to clarify the following issues at this point.
So far I have made no attempt whatsoever to place don Juan in a
cultural milieu. The fact that he considers himself to be a Yaqui Indian
does not mean that his knowledge of sorcery is known to or practiced by the
Yaqui Indians in general.
All the conversations that don Juan and I have had throughout the
apprenticeship were conducted in Spanish, and only because of his thorough
command of that language was I capable of obtaining complex explanations of
his system of beliefs.
I have maintained the practice of referring to that system as sorcery
and I have also maintained the practice of referring to don Juan as a
sorcerer, because these were categories he himself used.
Since I was capable of writing down most of what was said in the
beginning of the apprenticeship, and everything that was said in the later
phases of it, I gathered voluminous field notes. In order to render those
notes readable and still preserve the dramatic unity of don Juan's
teachings, I have had to edit them, but what I have deleted is, I believe,
immaterial to the points I want to raise.
In the case of my work with don Juan I have limited my efforts solely
to viewing him as a sorcerer and to acquiring membership in his knowledge.
For the purpose of presenting my argument I must first explain the
basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a
sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we
believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a
description.
For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best
of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in
mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a
description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.
He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a
teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when
the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According
to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because
none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to
anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows
the description of the world; and his membership becomes fullfledged, I
suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual
interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.
For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an
endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who
share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world
have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are
rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact, the reality of the world we know
is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality
is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious
proposition.
Fortunately, in the case of my apprenticeship, don Juan was not
concerned at all with whether or not I could take his proposition seriously,
and he proceeded to elucidate his points, in spite of my opposition, my
disbelief, and my inability to understand what he was saying. Thus, as a
teacher of sorcery, don Juan endeavored to describe the world to me from the
very first time we talked. My difficulty in grasping his concepts and
methods stemmed from the fact that the units of his description were alien
and incompatible with those of my own.
His contention was that he was teaching me how to "see" as opposed to
merely "looking, " and that "stopping the world" was the first step to
"seeing."
For years I had treated the idea of "stopping the world" as a cryptic
metaphor that really did not mean anything. It was only during an informal
conversation that took place towards the end of my apprenticeship that I
came to fully realize its scope and importance as one of the main
propositions of donJuan's knowledge.
Don Juan and I had been talking about different things in a relaxed and
unstructured manner. I told him about a friend of mine and his dilemma with
his nine year old son. The child, who had been living with the mother for
the past four years, was then living with my friend, and the problem was
what to do with him? According to my friend, the child was a misfit in
school; he lacked concentration and was not interested in anything. He was
given to tantrums, disruptive behavior, and to running away from home.
"Your friend certainly does have a problem, " don Juan said, laughing.
I wanted to keep on telling him all the "terrible" things the child had
done, but he interrupted me.
"There is no need to say any more about that poor little boy, " he
said. "There is no need for you or for me to regard his actions in our
thoughts one way or another."
His manner was abrupt and his tone was firm, but then he smiled.
"What can my friend do?" I asked.
"The worst thing he could do is to force that child to agree with him,"
don Juan said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that that child shouldn't be spanked or scared by his father
when he doesn't behave the way he wants him to."
"How can he teach him anything if he isn't firm with him?"
"Your friend should let someone else spank the child."
"He can't let anyone else touch his little boy!" I said, surprised at
his suggestion.
Don Juan seemed to enjoy my reaction and giggled.
"Your friend is not a warrior, " he said. "If he were, he would know
that the worst thing one can do is to confront human beings bluntly."
"What does a warrior do, don Juan?"
"A warrior proceeds strategically."
"I still don't understand what you mean."
"I mean that if your friend were a warrior he would help his child to
stop the world."
"How can my friend do that?"
"He would need personal power. He would need to be a sorcerer."
"But he isn't."
"In that case he must use ordinary means to help his son to change his
idea of the world. It is not stopping the world, but it will work just the
same."
I asked him to explain his statements.
"If I were your friend, " don Juan said, "I would start by hiring
someone to spank the little guy. I would go to skid row and hire the worst
looking man I could find."
"To scare a little boy?"
"Not just to scare a little boy, you fool. That little fellow must be
stopped, and being beaten by his father won't do it.
"If one wants to stop our fellow men one must always be outside the
circle that presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure."
The idea was preposterous, but somehow it was appealing to me.
Don Juan was resting his chin on his left palm. His left arm was
propped against his chest on a wooden box that served as a low table. His
eyes were closed but his eyeballs moved. I felt he was looking at me through
his closed eyelids. The thought scared me.
"Tell me more about what my friend should do with his little boy, " I
said.
"Tell him to go to skid row and very carefully select an ugly looking
derelict, " he went on. "Tell him to get a young one. One who still has some
strength left in him."
Don Juan then delineated a strange strategy. I was to instruct my
friend to have the man follow him or wait for him at a place where he would
go with his son. The man, in response to a prearranged cue to be given after
any objectionable behavior on the part of the child, was supposed to leap
from a hiding place, pick the child up, and spank the living daylights out
of him.
"After the man scares him, your friend must help the little boy regain
his confidence, in any way he can. If he follows this procedure three or
four times I assure you that that child will feel differently towards
everything. He will change his idea of the world."' "What if the fright
injures him?"
"Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone
always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.
"When that boy is more contained you must tell your friend to do one
last thing for him. He must find some way to get to a dead child, perhaps in
a hospital, or at the office of a doctor. He must take his son there and
show the dead child to him. He must let him touch the corpse once with his
left hand, on any place except the corpse's belly. After the boy does that
he will be renewed. The world will never be the same for him."
I realized then that throughout the years of our association don Juan
had been employing with me, although on a different scale, the same tactics
he was suggesting my friend should use with his son. I asked him about it.
He said that he had been trying all along to teach me how to "stop the
world."
"You haven't yet, " he said, smiling. "Nothing seems to work, because
you are very stubborn. If you were less stubborn, however, by now you would
probably have stopped the world with any of the techniques I have taught
you."
"What techniques, don Juan?"
"Everything I have told you to do was a technique for stopping the
world."
A few months after that conversation don Juan accomplished what he had
set out to do, to teach me to "stop the world."
That monumental event in my life compelled me to re-examine in detail
my work of ten years. It became evident to me that my original assumption
about the role of psychotropic plants was erroneous. They were not the
essential feature of the sorcerer's description of the world, but were only
an aid to cement, so to speak, parts of the description which I had been
incapable of perceiving otherwise. My insistence on holding on to my
standard version of reality rendered me almost deaf and blind to don Juan's
aims. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered
their use.
In reviewing the totality of my field notes I became aware that don
Juan had given me the bulk of the new description at the very beginning of
our association in what he called "techniques for stopping the world." I had
discarded those parts of my field notes in my earlier works because they did
not pertain to the use of psychotropic plants. I have now rightfully
reinstated them in the total scope of don Juan's teachings and they comprise
the first seventeen chapters of this work. The last three chapters are the
field notes covering the events that culminated in my "stopping the world."
In summing up I can say that when I began the apprenticeship, there was
another reality, that is to say, there was a sorcery description of the
world, which I did not know.
Don Juan, as a sorcerer and a teacher, taught me that description. The
ten year apprenticeship I have undergone consisted, therefore, in setting up
that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more
complex parts as I went along.
The termination of the apprenticeship meant that I had learned a new
description of the world in a convincing and authentic manner and thus I had
become capable of eliciting a new perception of the world, which matched its
new description. In other words, I had gained membership.
Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at "seeing" one first had to
"stop the world." "Stopping the world" was indeed an appropriate rendition
of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is
altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs
uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that
flow. In my case the set of circumstances alien to my normal flow of
interpretations was the sorcery description of the world. Don Juan's
precondition for "stopping the world" was that one had to be convinced; in
other words, one had to learn the new description in a total sense, for the
purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the
dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our
perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After "stopping the world" the next step was "seeing." By that don Juan
meant what I would like to categorize as "responding to the perceptual
solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call
reality."
My contention is that all these steps can only be understood in terms
of the description to which they belong; and since it was a description that
he endeavored to give me from the beginning, I must then let his teachings
be the only source of entrance into it. Thus, I have left don Juan's words
to speak for themselves.
PART ONE
STOPPING THE WORLD
REAFFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORLD AROUND US
"I understand you know a great deal about plants, sir, " I said to the
old Indian in front of me.
A friend of mine had just put us in contact and left the room and we
had introduced ourselves to each other. The old man had told me that his
name was Juan Matus.
"Did your friend tell you that?" he asked casually.
"Yes, he did."
"I pick plants, or rather, they let me pick them, " he said.
We were in the waiting room of a bus depot in Arizona. I asked him in
very formal Spanish if he would allow me to question him. I said, "Would the
gentleman [caballero] permit me to ask some questions?"
"Caballero, " which is derived from the word "caballo," horse,
originally meant horseman or a nobleman on horseback.
He looked at me inquisitively.
"I'm a horseman without a horse, " he said with a big smile and then he
added, "I've told you that my name is Juan Matos."
I liked his smile. I thought that, obviously he was a man that could
appreciate directness and I decided to boldly tackle him with a request.
I told him I was interested in collecting and studying medicinal
plants. I said that my special interest was the uses of the hallucinogenic
cactus, peyote, which I had studied at length at the university in Los
Angeles.
I thought that my presentation was very serious. I was very contained
and sounded perfectly credible to myself.
The old man shook his head slowly, and I, encouraged by his silence,
added that it would no doubt be profitable for us to get together and talk
about peyote.
It was at that moment that he lifted his head and looked me squarely in
the eyes. It was a formidable look. Yet it was not menacing or awesome in
any way. It was a look that went through me. I became tongue tied at once
and could not continue with the harangues about myself. That was the end of
our meeting. Yet he left on a note of hope. He said that perhaps I could
visit him at his house someday.
It would be difficult to assess the impact of don Juan's look if my
inventory of experience is not somehow brought to bear on the uniqueness of
that event. When I began to study anthropology and thus met don Juan, I was
already an expert in "getting around." I had left my home years before and
that meant in my evaluation that I was capable of taking care of myself.
Whenever I was rebuffed could usually cajole my way in or make concessions,
argue, get angry, or if nothing succeeded I would whine or complain; in
other words, there was always something I knew I could do under the
circumstances, and never in my life had any human being stopped my momentum
so swiftly and so definitely as don Juan did that afternoon. But it was not
only a matter of being silenced; there had been times when I had been unable
to say a word to my opponent because of some inherent respect I felt for
him, still my anger or frustration was manifested in my thoughts. Don Juan's
look, however, numbed me to the point that I could not think coherently.
I became thoroughly intrigued with that stupendous look and decided to
search for him.
I prepared myself for six months, after that first meeting, reading up
on the uses of peyote among the American Indians, especially about the
peyote cult of the Indians of the Plains. I became acquainted with every
work available, and when I felt I was ready I went back to Arizona.
Saturday, December 17, 1960
I found his house after making long and taxing inquiries among the
local Indians. It was early afternoon when I arrived and parked in front of
it. I saw him sitting on a wooden milk crate. He seemed to recognize me and
greeted me as I got out of my car.
We exchanged social courtesies for a while and then, in plain terms, I
confessed that I had been very devious with him the first time we had met. I
had boasted that I knew a great deal about peyote, when in reality I knew
nothing about it. He stared at me. His eyes were very kind.
I told him that for six months I had been reading to prepare myself for
our meeting and that this time I really knew a great deal more.
He laughed. Obviously, there was something in my statement which was
funny to him. He was laughing at me and I felt a bit confused and offended.
He apparently noticed my discomfort and assured me that although I had
had good intentions there was really no way to prepare myself for our
meeting.
I wondered if it would have been proper to ask whether that statement
had any hidden meaning, but I did not; yet he seemed to be attuned to my
feelings and proceeded to explain what he had meant. He said that my
endeavors reminded him of a story about some people a certain king had
persecuted and killed once upon a time. He said that in the story the
persecuted people were indistinguishable from their persecutors, except that
they insisted on pronouncing certain words in a peculiar manner proper only
to them; that flaw, of course, was the giveaway. The king posted roadblocks
at critical points where an official would ask every man passing by to
pronounce a key word. Those who could pronounce it the way the king
pronounced it would live, but those who could not were immediately put to
death. The point of the story was that one day a young man decided to
prepare himself for passing the roadblock by learning to pronounce the test
word just as the king liked it.
Don Juan said, with a broad smile, that in fact it took the young man
"six months" to master such a pronunciation. And then came the day of the
great test; the young man very confidently came upon the roadblock and
waited for the official to ask him to pronounce the word.
At that point don Juan very dramatically stopped his recounting and
looked at me. His pause was very studied and seemed a bit corny to me, but I
played along. I had heard the theme of the story before. It had to do with
Jews in Germany and the way one could tell who was a Jew by the way they
pronounced certain words. I also knew the punch line: the young man was
going to get caught because the official had forgotten the key word and
asked him to pronounce another word which was very similar but which the
young man had not learned to say correctly.
Don Juan seemed to be waiting for me to ask what happened, so I did.
"What happened to him?" I asked, trying to sound naive and interested
in the story.
"The young man, who was truly foxy, " he said, "realized that the
official had forgotten the key word, and before the man could say anything
else he confessed that he had prepared himself for six months."
He made another pause and looked at me with a mischievous glint in his
eyes. This time he had turned the tables on me. The young man's confession
was a new element and I no longer knew how the story would end.
"Well, what happened then?" I asked, truly interested.
"The young man was killed instantly, of course, " he said and broke
into a roaring laughter.
I liked very much the way he had entrapped my interest; above all I
liked the way he had linked that story to my own case. In fact, he seemed to
have constructed it to fit me. He was making fun of me in a very subtle and
artistic manner. I laughed with him.
Afterwards I told him that no matter how stupid I sounded I was really
interested in learning something about plants.
"I like to walk a great deal, " he said.
I thought he was deliberately changing the topic of conversation to
avoid answering me. I did not want to antagonize him with my insistence.
He asked me if I wanted to go with him on a short hike in the desert. I
eagerly told him that I would love to walk in the desert.
"This is no picnic, " he said in a tone of warning.
I told him that I wanted very seriously to work with him. I said that I
needed information, any kind of information, on the uses of medicinal herbs,
and that I was willing to pay him for his time and effort.
"You'll be working for me, " I said. "And I'll pay you wages."
"How much would you pay me?" he asked.
I detected a note of greed in his voice.
"Whatever you think is appropriate, " I said.
"Pay me for my time . . . with your time, " he said.
I thought he was a most peculiar fellow. I told him I did not
understand what he meant. He replied that there was nothing to say about
plants, thus to take my money would be unthinkable for him.
He looked at me piercingly.
"What are you doing in your pocket?" he asked, frowning. "Are you
playing with your whanger?"
He was referring to my taking notes on a minute pad inside the enormous
pockets of my windbreaker.
When I told him what I was doing he laughed heartily.
I said that I did not want to disturb him by writing in front of him.
"If you want to write, write, " he said. "You don't disturb me."
We hiked in the surrounding desert until it was almost dark. He did not
show me any plants nor did he talk about them at all. We stopped for a
moment to rest by some large bushes.
"Plants are very peculiar things, " he said without looking at me.
"They are alive and they feel."
At the very moment he made that statement a strong gust of wind shook
the desert chaparral around us. The bushes made a rattling noise.
"Do you hear that?" he asked me, putting his right hand to his ear as
if he were aiding his hearing. "The leaves and the wind are agreeing with
me."
I laughed. The friend who had put us in contact had already told me to
watch out, because the old man was very eccentric. I thought the "agreement
with the leaves" was one of his eccentricities.
We walked for a while longer but he still did not show me any plants,
nor did he pick any of them. He simply breezed through the bushes touching
them gently. Then he came to a halt and sat down on a rock and told me to
rest and look around.
I insisted on talking. Once more I let him know that I wanted very much
to learn about plants, especially peyote. I pleaded with him to become my
informant in exchange for some sort of monetary reward.
"You don't have to pay me, " he said. "You can ask me anything you
want. I will tell you what I know and then I will tell you what to do with
it."
He asked me if I agreed with the arrangement. I was delighted. Then he
added a cryptic statement: "Perhaps there is nothing to learn about plants,
because there is nothing to say about them."
I did not understand what he had said or what he had meant by it.
"What did you say?" I asked.
He repeated the statement three times and then the whole area was
shaken by the roar of an Air Force jet flying low.
"There! The world has just agreed with me, " he said, putting his left
hand to his ear.
I found him very amusing. His laughter was contagious.
"Are you from Arizona, don Juan?" I asked, in an effort to keep the
conversation centered around his being my informant.
He looked at me and nodded affirmatively. His eyes seemed to be tired.
I could see the white underneath his pupils.
"Were you born in this locality?"
He nodded his head again without answering me. It seemed to be an
affirmative gesture, but it also seemed to be the nervous head shake of a
person who is thinking.
"And where are you from yourself?" he asked.
"I come from South America, " I said.
"That's a big place. Do you come from all of it?"
His eyes were piercing again as he looked at me.
I began to explain the circumstances of my birth, but he interrupted
me.
"We are alike in this respect, " he said. "I live here now but I'm
really a Yaqui from Sonora."
"Is that so! I myself come from-"
He did not let me finish.
"I know, I know, " he said. "You are who you are, from wherever you
are, as I am a Yaqui from Sonora."
His eyes were very shiny and his laughter was strangely unsettling. He
made me feel as if he had caught me in a lie. I experienced a peculiar
sensation of guilt. I had the feeling he knew something I did not know or
did not want to tell.
My strange embarrassment grew. He must have noticed it, for he stood up
and asked me if I wanted to go eat in a restaurant in town.
Walking back to his home and then driving into town made me feel
better, but I was not quite relaxed. I somehow felt threatened, although I
could not pinpoint the reason.
I wanted to buy him some beer in the restaurant. He said that he never
drank, not even beer. I laughed to myself. I did not believe him; the friend
who had put us in contact had told me that "the old man was plastered out of
his mind most of the time." I really did not mind if he was lying to me
about not drinking. I liked him; there was something very soothing about his
person.
I must have had a look of doubt on my face, for he then went on to
explain that he used to drink in his youth, but that one day he simply
dropped it.
"People hardly ever realize that we can cut anything from our lives,
any time, just like that." He snapped his fingers.
"Do you think that one can stop smoking or drinking that easily?" I
asked.
"Sure!" he said with great conviction. "Smoking and drinking are
nothing. Nothing at all if we want to drop them."
At that very moment the water that was boiling in the coffee percolator
made a loud perking sound.
"Hear that!" don Juan exclaimed with a shine in his eyes. "The boiling
water agrees with me."
Then he added after a pause, "A man can get agreements from everything
around him."
At that crucial instant the coffee percolator made a truly obscene
gurgling sound.
He looked at the percolator and softly said, "Thank you, "nodded his
head, and then broke into a roaring laughter.
I was taken aback. His laughter was a bit too loud, but I was genuinely
amused by it all.
My first real session with my "informant" ended then. He said goodbye
at the door of the restaurant. I told him I had to visit some friends and
that I would like to see him again at the end of the following week.
"When will you be home?" I asked.
He scrutinized me.
"Whenever you come, " he replied.
"I don't know exactly when I can come."
"Just come then and don't worry."
"What if you're not in?"
"I'll be there, " he said, smiling, and walked away.
I ran after him and asked him if he would mind my bringing a camera
with me to take pictures of him and his house.
"That's out of the question, " he said with a frown.
"How about a tape recorder? Would you mind that?"
"I'm afraid there's no possibility of that either."
I became annoyed and began to fret. I said I saw no logical reason for
his refusal.
Don Juan shook his head negatively.
"Forget it, " he said forcefully. "And if you still want to see me
don't ever mention it again."
I staged a weak final complaint. I said that pictures and recordings
were indispensable to my work. He said that there was only one thing which
was indispensable for anything we did. He called it "the spirit."
"One can't do without the spirit, " he said. "And you don't have it.
Worry about that and not about pictures."
"What do you . . . ?"
He interrupted me with a movement of his hand and walked backwards a
few steps.
"Be sure to come back, " he said softly and waved goodbye.
ERASING PERSONAL HISTORY
Thursday, December 22, 1960
Don Juan was sitting on the floor, by the door of his house, with his
back against the wall. He turned over a wooden milk crate and asked me to
sit down and make myself at home. I offered him some cigarettes. I had
brought a carton of them. He said he did not smoke but he accepted the gift.
We talked about the coldness of the desert nights and other ordinary topics
of conversation.
I asked him if I was interfering with his normal routine. He looked at
me with a sort of frown and said he had no routines, and that I could stay
with him all afternoon if I wanted to.
I had prepared some genealogy and kinship charts that I wanted to fill
out with his help. I had also compiled, from the ethnographic literature, a
long list of culture traits that were purported to belong to the Indians of
the area. I wanted to go through the list with him and mark all the items
that were familiar to him.
I began with the kinship charts.
"What did you call your father?" I asked.
"I called him Dad, " he said with a very serious face.
I felt a little bit annoyed, but I proceeded on the assumption that he
had not understood.
I showed him the chart and explained that one space was for the father
and another space was for the mother. I gave as an example the different
words used in English and in Spanish for father and mother.
I thought that perhaps I should have taken mother first.
"What did you call your mother?" I asked.
"I called her Mom, " he replied in a naive tone.
"I mean what other words did you use to call your father and mother?
How did you call them?" I said, trying to be patient and polite.
He scratched his head and looked at me with a stupid expression.
"Golly!" he said. "You got me there. Let me think."
After a moment's hesitation he seemed to remember something and I got
ready to write.
"Well, " he said, as if he were involved in serious thought, "how else
did I call them? I called them Hey, hey, Dad! Hey, hey, Mom!"
I laughed against my desire. His expression was truly comical and at
that moment I did not know whether he was a preposterous old man pulling my
leg or whether he was really a simpleton. Using all the patience I had, I
explained to him that these were very serious questions and that it was very
important for my work to fill out the forms. I tried to make him understand
the idea of a genealogy and personal history.
"What were the names of your father and mother?" I asked.
He looked at me with clear kind eyes. "Don't waste your time with that
crap, " he said softly but with unsuspected force. I did not know what to
say; it was as if someone else had uttered those words. A moment before, he
had been a fumbling stupid Indian scratching his head, and then, in an
instant he had reversed the roles; I was the stupid one, and he was staring
at me with an indescribable look that was not a look of arrogance, or
defiance, or hatred, or contempt. His eyes were kind and clear and
penetrating.
"I don't have any personal history, " he said after a long pause. "One
day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and,
like drinking, I dropped it."
I did not quite understand what he meant by that. I suddenly felt ill
at ease, threatened. I reminded him that he had assured me that it was all
right to ask him questions. He reiterated that he did not mind at all.
"I don't have personal history any more, " he said and looked at me
probingly. "I dropped it one day when I felt it was no longer necessary."
I stared at him, trying to detect the hidden meanings of his words.
"How can one drop one's personal history?" I asked in an argumentative
mood.
"One must first have the desire to drop it, " he said. "And then one
must proceed harmoniously to chop it off, little by little."
"Why should anyone have such a desire?" I exclaimed.
I had a terribly strong attachment to my personal history. My family
roots were deep. I honestly felt that without them my life had no continuity
or purpose.
"Perhaps you should tell me what you mean by dropping one's personal
history, " I said.
"To do away with it, that's what I mean, " he replied cuttingly.
I insisted that I must not have understood the proposition.
"Take you for instance, " I said. "You are a Yaqui. You can't change
that."
"Am I?" he asked, smiling. "How do you know that?"
"True!" I said. "I can't know that with certainty, at this point, but
you know it and that is what counts. That's what makes it personal history."
I felt I had driven a hard nail in.
"The fact that I know whether I am a Yaqui or not does not make it
personal history, " he replied. "Only when someone else knows that does it
become personal history. And I assure you that no one will ever know that
for sure."
I had written down what he had said in a clumsy way. I stopped writing
and looked at him. I could not figure him out. I mentally ran through my
impressions of him; the mysterious and unprecedented way he had looked at me
during our first meeting, the charm with which he had claimed that he
received agreement from everything around him, his annoying humor and his
alertness, his look of bona fide stupidity when I asked about his father and
mother, and then the unsuspected force of his statements which had snapped
me apart.
"You don't know what I am, do you?" he said as if he were reading my
thoughts. "You will never know who or what I am, because I don't have a
personal history."
He asked me if I had a father. I told him I did. He said that my father
was an example of what he had in mind. He urged me to remember what my
father thought of me.
"Your father knows everything about you, " he said. "So he has you all
figured out. He knows who you are and what you do, and there is no power on
earth that can make him change his mind about you."
Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and
that I kept feeding that idea with everything I did. "Don't you see?" he
asked dramatically. "You must renew your personal history by telling your
parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other
hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is
angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down
with their thoughts."
Suddenly the idea became clear in my mind. I had almost known it
myself, but I had never examined it. Not having personal history was indeed
an appealing concept, at least on the intellectual level; it gave me,
however, a sense of loneliness which I found threatening and distasteful. I
wanted to discuss my feelings with him, but I kept myself in check;
something was terribly incongruous in the situation at hand. I felt
ridiculous trying to get into a philosophical argument with an old Indian
who obviously did not have the "sophistication" of a university student.
Somehow he had led me away from my original intention of asking him about
his genealogy.
"I don't know how we ended up talking about this when all I wanted was
some names for my charts, " I said, trying to steer the conversation back to
the topic I wanted.
"It's terribly simple, " he said. "The way we ended up talking about it
was because I said that to ask questions about one's past is a bunch of
crap."
His tone was firm. I felt there was no way to make him budge, so I
changed my tactics.
"Is this idea of not having personal history something that the Yaquis
do?" I asked.
"It's something that I do."
"Where did you learn it?"
"I learned it during the course of my life."
"Did your father teach you that?"
"No. Let's say that I learned it by myself and now I am going to give
you its secret, so you won't go away empty-handed today."
He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. I laughed at his
histrionics. I had to admit that he was stupendous at that. The thought
crossed my mind that I was in the presence of a born actor.
"Write it down, " he said patronizingly. "Why not? You seem to be more
comfortable writing."
I looked at him and my eyes must have betrayed my confusion. He slapped
his thighs and laughed with great delight.
"It is best to erase all personal history, " he said slowly, as if
giving me time to write it down in my clumsy way, "because that would make
us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people."
I could not believe that he was actually saying that. I had a very
confusing moment. He must have read in my face my inner turmoil and used it
immediately.
"Take yourself, for instance, " he went on saying. "Right now you don't
know whether you are coming or going. And that is so, because I have erased
my personal history. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and
my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do."
"But, you yourself know who you are, don't you?" I interjected.
"You bet I ... don't, " he exclaimed and rolled on the floor, laughing
at my surprised look.
He had paused long enough to make me believe that he was going to say
that he did know, as I was anticipating it. His subterfuge was very
threatening to me. I actually became afraid.
"That is the little secret I am going to give you today, " he said in a
low voice. "Nobody knows my personal history. Nobody knows who I am or what
I do. Not even I."
He squinted his eyes. He was not looking at me but beyond me over my
right shoulder. He was sitting cross-legged, his back was straight and yet
he seemed to be so relaxed. At that moment he was the very picture of
fierceness. I fancied him to be an Indian chief, a "red-skinned warrior" in
the romantic frontier sagas of my childhood. My romanticism carried me away
and the most insidious feeling of ambivalence enveloped me. I could
sincerely say that I liked him a great deal and in the same breath I could
say that I was deadly afraid of him.
He maintained that strange stare for a long moment.
"How can I know who I am, when I am all this?" he said, sweeping the
surroundings with a gesture of his head. Then he glanced at me and smiled.
"Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase
everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing
is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you're too real.
Your endeavors are too real; your moods are too real. Don't take things so
for granted. You must begin to erase yourself."
"What for?" I asked belligerently.
It became clear to me then that he was prescribing behavior for me. All
my life I had reached a breaking point when someone attempted to tell me
what to do; the mere thought of being told what to do put me immediately on
the defensive.
"You said that you wanted to learn about plants, " he said calmly. "Do
you want to get something for nothing? What do you think this is? We agreed
that you would ask me questions and I'd tell you what I know. If you don't
like it, there is nothing else we can say to each other."
His terrible directness made me feel peeved, and begrudgingly I
conceded that he was right.
"Let's put it this way then, " he went on. "If you want to learn about
plants, since there is really nothing to say about them, you must, among
other things, erase your personal history."
"How?" I asked.
"Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do.
Then you must leave everyone who knows you well. This way you'll build up a
fog around yourself."
"But that's absurd, " I protested. "Why shouldn't people know me?
What's wrong with that?"
"What's wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for
granted and from that moment on you won't be able to break the tie of their
thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one
knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance."
"But that would be lying."
"I'm not concerned with lies or truths, " he said severely. "Lies are
lies only if you have personal history." I argued that I did not like to
deliberately mystify people or mislead them. His reply was that I misled
everybody anyway.
The old man had touched a sore spot in my life. I did not pause to ask
him what he meant by that or how he knew that I mystified people all the
time. I simply reacted to his statement, defending myself by means of an
explanation. I said that I was painfully aware that my family and my friends
believed I was unreliable, when in reality I had never told a lie in my
life.
"You always knew how to lie, " he said. "The only thing that was
missing was that you didn't know why to do it. Now you do."
I protested. "Don't you see that I'm really sick and tired of people
thinking that I'm unreliable?" I said.
"But you are unreliable, " he replied with conviction.
"Damn it to hell, man, I am not!" I exclaimed.
My mood, instead of forcing him into seriousness, made him laugh
hysterically. I really despised the old man for all his cockiness.
Unfortunately he was right about me.
After a while I calmed down and he continued talking.
"When one does not have personal history, " he explained, "nothing that
one says can be taken for a lie. Your trouble is that you have to explain
everything to everybody, compulsively, and at the same time you want to keep
the freshness, the newness of what you do. Well, since you can't be excited
after explaining everything you've done, you lie in order to keep on going."
I was truly bewildered by the scope of our conversation. I wrote down
all the details of our exchange in the best way I could, concentrating on
what he was saying rather than pausing to deliberate on my prejudices or on
his meanings.
"From now on, " he said, "you must simply show people whatever you care
to show them, but without ever telling exactly how you've done it."
"I can't keep secrets!" I exclaimed. "What you are saying is useless to
me."
"Then change!" he said cuttingly and with a fierce glint in his eyes.
He looked like a strange wild animal. And yet he was so coherent in his
thoughts and so verbal. My annoyance gave way to a state of irritating
confusion.
"You see, " he went on, "we only have two alternatives; we either take
everything for sure and real, or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up
bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second
and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and
mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not
even ourselves."
I contended that erasing personal history would only increase our