JOURNEY TO IXTLAN -- THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN

Saturday, April 8, 1962

"Is death a personage, don Juan?" I asked as I sat down on the porch.

There was an air of bewilderment in don Juan's look. He was holding a bag of groceries I had brought him. He carefully placed them on the ground and sat down  in front of me. I felt encouraged and explained that I wanted to know if death was a person, or like a person, when it watched a warrior's last dance.

"What difference does it make?" don Juan asked.

I told him that the image was fascinating to me and I wanted to know how he had arrived at it. How he knew that that was so.

"It's all very simple," he said. "A man of knowledge knows that death is the last witness because he sees."

"Do you mean that you have witnessed a warrior's last dance yourself?"

"No. One cannot be such a witness. Only death can do that. But I have seen my own death watching me and I have danced to it as though I were dying. At the end of my dance death did not point in any direction, and my place of predilection did not shiver saying goodbye to me. So my time on earth was not up yet and I did not die. When all that took place, I had limited power and I did not understand the designs of my own death, thus I believed I was dying."

"Was your death like a person?"

"You're a funny bird. You think you are going to understand by asking questions. I don't think you will, but who am I to say?

"Death is not like a person. It is rather a presence. But one may also choose to say that it is nothing and yet it is everything. One will be right on every count. Death is whatever one wishes.

"I am at ease with people, so death is a person for me. I am also given to mysteries, so death has hollow eyes for me. I can look through them. They are like two windows and yet they move, like eyes move. And so I can say that death with its hollow eyes looks at a warrior while he dances for the last time on earth."

"But is that so only for you, don Juan, or is it the same for other warriors?"

"It is the same for every warrior that has a dance of power, and yet it is not. Death witnesses a warrior's last dance, but the manner in which a warrior sees his death is a personal matter. It could be anything--a bird, a light, a person, a bush, a pebble, a piece of fog, or an unknown presence."

Don Juan's images of death disturbed me. I could not find adequate words to voice my questions and I stammered. He stared at me, smiling, and coaxed me to speak up.

I asked him if the manner in which a warrior saw his death depended on the way he had been brought up. I used the Yuma and Yaqui Indians as examples. My own idea was that culture determined the way in which one would envision death.

"It doesn't matter how one was brought up," he said. "What determines the way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determines how he lives and how he dies."

"What is personal power?"

"Personal power is a feeling," he said. "Something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires regardless of one's origin. I already have told you that a warrior is a hunter of power, and that I am teaching you how to hunt and store it. The difficulty with you, which is the difficulty with all of us, is to be convinced. You need to believe that personal power can be used and that it is possible to store it, but you haven't been convinced so far."

I told him that he had made his point and that I was as convinced as I would ever be. He laughed.

"That is not the type of conviction I am talking about," he said.

He tapped my shoulder with two or three soft punches and added with a cackle, "I don't need to be humored, you know."

I felt obliged to assure him that I was serious.

"I don't doubt it," he said. "But to be convinced means that you can act by yourself. It will still take you a great deal of effort to do that. Much more has to be done. You have just begun."

He was quiet for a moment. His face acquired a placid expression.

"It's funny the way you sometimes remind me of myself,'" he went on. "I too did not want to take the path of a warrior. I believed that all that work was for nothing, and since we are all going to die what difference would it make to be a warrior? I was wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. Whenever you do realize that you are wrong, and that it certainly makes a world of difference, you can say that you are convinced. And then you can proceed by yourself. And by yourself you may even become a man of knowledge."

I asked him to explain what he meant by a man of knowledge.

"A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning," he said.  "A man who has, without rushing or faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of personal power."

He discussed the concept in brief terms and then discarded it as a topic of conversation, saying that I should only be concerned with the idea of storing personal power.

"That's incomprehensible," I protested. "I can't really figure out what you are driving at. "

"Hunting power is a peculiar event," he said. "It first has to be an idea, then it has to be set up, step by step, and then, bingo! It happens."

"How does it happen?"

Don Juan stood up. He began stretching his arms and arching his back like a cat. His bones, as usual, made a series of cracking sounds.

"Let's go," he said. "We have a long journey ahead of us."

"But there are so many things I want to ask you," I said.

"We are going to a place of power," he said as he stepped inside his house. "Why don't you save your questions for the time we are there? We may have an opportunity to talk."

I thought we were going to drive, so I stood up and walked to my car, but don Juan called me from the house and told me to pick up my net with gourds. He was waiting for me at the edge of the desert chaparral behind his house.

"We have to hurry up," he said.

We reached the lower slopes of the western Sierra Madre mountains around three P .M.  It had been a warm day but towards the late afternoon the wind became cold.  Don Juan sat down on a rock and signaled me to do likewise.

"What are we going to do here this time, don Juan?"

"You know very well that we're here to hunt power."

"I know that. But what are we going to do here in particular?"

"You know that I don't have the slightest idea."

"Do you mean that you never follow a plan?"

"Hunting power is a very strange affair," be said. "There is no way to plan it ahead of time. That's what's exciting about it. A warrior proceeds as if he had a plan though because he trusts his personal power. He knows for a fact that it will make him act in the most appropriate fashion."

I pointed out that his statements were somehow contradictory. If a warrior already had personal power, why was he hunting for it?

Don Juan raised his brows and made a gesture of feigned disgust.

"You're the one who is hunting personal power," he said. "And I am the warrior who already has it. You asked me if I had a plan and I said that I trust my personal power to guide me and that I don't need to have a plan."

We remained quiet for a moment and then began walking again. The slopes were very steep and climbing them was very difficult and extremely tiring for me. On the other hand, there seemed to be no end to don Juan's stamina. He did not run or hurry. His walking was steady and tireless. I noticed that he was not even perspiring, even after having climbed an enormous and almost vertical slope. When I reached the top of it, don Juan was already there, waiting for me. As I sat down next to him I felt that my heart was about to burst out of my chest. I lay on my back and perspiration literally poured from my brows.

Don Juan laughed out loud and rolled me back and forth for a while. The motion helped me catch my breath.

I told him that I was simply awed by his physical prowess.

"I've been trying to draw your attention to it all along," he said.

"You're not old at all, don Juan!"

"Of course not.  I've been trying to make you notice it."

"How do you do it?"

"I don't do anything. My body feels fine, that's all. I treat myself very well, therefore, I have no reason to feel tired or ill at ease. The secret is not in what you do to yourself but rather in what you don't do."

I waited for an explanation. He seemed to be aware of my incapacity to understand. He smiled knowingly  and stood up.

"This is a place of power," he said. "Find a place for us to camp here on this hilltop."

I began to protest. I wanted him to explain what I should not do to my body. He made an imperative gesture.

"Cut the guff," he said softly. "This time just act for a change. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to find a suitable place to rest. It might take you all night. It is not important that you find the spot either; the important issue is that you try to find it."

I put away my writing pad and stood up. Don Juan reminded me, as he had done countless times, whenever he had asked me to find a resting place, that I had to look without focusing on any particular spot, squinting my eyes until my view was blurred.

I began to walk, scanning the ground with my half closed eyes. Don Juan walked a few feet to my right and a couple of steps behind me.

I covered the periphery of the hilltop first. My intention was to work my way in a spiral to the center. But once I had covered the circumference of the hilltop, don Juan made me stop.

He said I was letting my preference for routines take over. In a sarcastic tone he added that I was certainly covering the whole area systematically, but in  such a stagnant way that I would not be able to perceive the suitable place. He added that he himself knew where it was, so there was no chance for improvisations on my part.

"What should I be doing instead?" I asked.

Don Juan made me sit down. He then plucked a single leaf from a number of bushes and gave them to me. He ordered me to lie down on my back and loosen my belt and place the leaves against the skin of my umbilical region. He supervised my movements and instructed me to press the leaves against my body with both hands. He then ordered me to close my eyes and warned me that if I wanted perfect results I should not lose hold of the leaves, or open my eyes, or try to sit up when he shifted my body to a position of power.

He grabbed me by the right armpit and swirled me around. I had an invincible desire to peek through my half-closed eyelids, but don Juan put his hand over my eyes. He commanded me to concern myself only with the feeling of warmth that was going to come from the leaves.

I lay motionless for a moment and then I began to feel a strange heat emanating from the leaves. I first sensed it with the palms of my hands, then the warmth extended to my abdomen, and finally it literally invaded my entire body. In a matter of minutes my feet were burning up with a heat that reminded me of times when I had had a high temperature.

I told don Juan about the unpleasant sensation and my desire to take off my shoes. He said that he was going to help me stand up, that I should not open my eyes until he told me to, and that I should keep pressing the leaves to my stomach until I had found the suitable spot to rest.

When I was on my feet he whispered in my ear that I should open my eyes, and that I should walk without a plan, letting the power of the leaves pull me and guide me.

I began to walk aimlessly. The heat of my body was uncomfortable. I believed I was running a high temperature, and I became absorbed in trying to conceive by what means don Juan had produced it.

Don Juan walked behind me. He suddenly let out a scream that nearly paralyzed me. He explained, laughing, that abrupt noises scare away unpleasant spirits. I squinted my eyes and walked back and forth for about half an hour. In that time the uncomfortable heat of my body turned into a pleasurable warmth. I experienced a sensation of lightness as I paced up and down the hilltop. I felt disappointed, however; I had somehow expected to detect some kind of visual phenomenon, but there were no changes whatsoever in the periphery of my field of vision, no unusual colors, or glare, or dark masses.

I finally became tired of squinting my eyes and opened them. I was standing in front of a small ledge of sandstone, which was one of the few barren rocky places on the hilltop; the rest was dirt with widely spaced small bushes. It seemed that the vegetation had burned sometime before and the new growth was not fully mature yet. For some unknown reason I thought that the sandstone ledge was beautiful. I stood in front of it for a long time. And then I simply sat down on it.

"Good! Good!" don Juan said and patted me on the back.

He then told me to carefully pull the leaves from under my clothes and place them on the rock.

As soon as I had taken the leaves away from my skin I began to cool off. I took my pulse. It seemed to be normal.

Don Juan laughed and called me "doctor Carlos" and asked me if I could also take his pulse. He said that what I had felt was the power of the leaves, and that that power had cleared me and had enabled me to fulfill my task.

I asserted in all sincerity that I had done nothing in particular, and that I sat down on that place because I was tired and because I found the color of the sandstone very appealing.

Don Juan did not say anything. He was standing a few feet away from me. Suddenly he jumped back and with incredible agility ran and leaped over some bushes to a high crest of rocks some distance away.

"What's the matter?" I asked, alarmed.

"Watch the direction in which the wind will blow your leaves," he said. "Count them quickly. The wind is coming. Keep half of them and put them back against your belly,"

I counted twenty leaves. I stuck ten under my shirt and then a strong gust of wind scattered the other ten in a westerly direction. I had the eerie feeling as I saw the leaves being blown off that a real entity was deliberately sweeping them into the amorphous mass of green shrubbery.

Don Juan walked back to where I was and sat down next to me, to my left, facing the south.

We did not speak a word for a long time. I did not know what to say. I was exhausted. I wanted to close my eyes, but I did not dare. Don Juan must have noticed my state and said that it was all right to fall asleep. He told me to place my hands on my abdomen, over the leaves, and try to feel that I was lying suspended on the bed of "strings" that he had made for me on the "place of my predilection." I closed my eyes and a memory of the peace and plenitude I had experienced while sleeping on that other hilltop invaded me. I wanted to find out if I could actually feel I was suspended but I fell asleep.

I woke up just before the sunset. Sleeping had refreshed and invigorated me. Don Juan had also fallen asleep. He opened his eyes at the same time I did. It was windy but I did not feel cold. The leaves on my stomach seemed to have acted as a furnace, a heater of some sort.

I examined the surroundings. The place I had selected to rest was like a small basin. One could actually sit on it as on a long couch; there was enough of a rock wall to serve as a backrest. I also found out that don Juan had brought my writing pads and placed them underneath my head.

"You found the right place," he said, smiling. "And the whole operation took place as I had told you it would. Power guided you here without any plan on your part."

"What kind of leaves did you give me?" I asked.

The warmth that had radiated from the leaves and had kept me in such a comfortable state, without any blankets or extra thick clothing, was indeed an absorbing phenomenon for me.

"They were just leaves," don Juan said.

"Do you mean that I could grab leaves from any bush and they would produce the same effect on me?"

"No. I don't mean that you yourself can do that. You have no personal power. I mean that any kind of leaves would help you, providing that the person who gives them to you has power. What helped you today was not the leaves but power."

"Your power, don Juan?"

"I suppose you could say that it was my power, although that is not really accurate. Power does not belong to anyone. Some of us may gather it and then it could be given directly to someone else. You see, the key to stored power is that it can be used only to help someone else store power."

I asked him if that meant that his power was limited only to helping others. Don Juan patiently explained that he could use his personal power however he pleased, in anything he himself wanted, but when it came to giving it directly to another person, it was useless unless that person utilized it for his own search of personal power.

"Everything a man does hinges on his personal power," don Juan went on. "Therefore, for one who doesn't have any, the deeds of a powerful man are incredible. It takes power to even conceive what power is. This is what I have been trying to tell you all along. But I know you don't understand, not because you don't want to but because you have very little personal power."

"What should I do, don Juan?"

"Nothing. Just proceed as you are now. Power will find a way."

He stood up and turned around in a complete circle, staring at everything in the surroundings. His body moved at the same time his eyes moved; the total effect was that of a hieratic mechanical toy that turned in a complete circle in a precise and unaltered movement.

I looked at him with my mouth open. He hid a smile, cognizant of my surprise.

"Today you are going to hunt power in the darkness of the day," he said and sat down.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Tonight you'll venture into those unknown hills. In the darkness they are not hills."

"What are they?"

"They are something else. Something unthinkable for you, since you have never witnessed their existence."

"What do you mean, don Juan? You always scare me with that spooky talk."

He laughed and kicked my calf softly.

"The world is a mystery," he said. "And it is not at all as you picture it."

He seemed to reflect for a moment. His head bobbed up and down with a rhythmical shake, then he smiled and added, "Well, it is also as you picture it, but that's not all there is to the world; there is much more to it. You have been finding that out all along, and perhaps tonight you will add one more piece."

His tone sent a chill through my body.

"What are you planning to do?" I asked.

"I don't plan anything. All is decided by the same power that allowed you to find this spot."

Don Juan got up and pointed to something in the distance; I assumed that he wanted me to stand up and look. I tried to jump to my feet, but before I had fully stood up, don Juan pushed me down with great force.

"I didn't ask you to follow me," he said in a severe voice. Then he softened his tone and added, "You're going to have a difficult time tonight, and you will need all the personal power you can muster. Stay where you are and save yourself for later."

He explained that he was not pointing at anything but just making sure that certain things were out there. He assured me that everything was all right and said that I should sit quietly and get busy, because I had a lot of time to write before total darkness had set in the land. His smile was contagious and very comforting.

"But what are we going to do, don Juan?"

He shook his head from side to side in an exaggerated gesture of disbelief.

"Write!" he commanded me and turned his back to me.

There was nothing else for me to do. I worked on my notes until it was too dark to write.

Don Juan maintained the same position all the time I was working. He seemed to be absorbed in staring into the distance towards the west. But as soon as I stopped he turned to me and said in a joking tone that the only ways to shut me up were to give me something to eat, or make me write, or put me to sleep.

He took a small bundle from his knapsack and ceremoniously opened it. It contained pieces of dry meat. He handed me a piece and took another for himself and began to chew on it. He casually informed me that it was power food, which both of us needed on that occasion. I was too hungry to think about the possibility that the dry meat may have contained a psychotropic substance. We ate in complete silence until there was no more meat, and by that time it was quite dark.

Don Juan stood up and stretched his arms and back. He suggested I should do the same. He said it was a good practice to stretch the entire body after sleeping, sitting, or walking.

I followed his advice and some of the leaves I had kept under my shirt slid through the legs of my pants. I wondered if I should try to pick them up, but he said to forget about it, that there was no longer any need for them and that I should let them fall as they might.

Then don Juan came very close to me and whispered in my right ear that I was supposed to follow him at very close range and imitate everything he did. He said that we were safe on the spot where we stood, because we were, so to speak, at the edge of the night.

"This is not the night," he whispered, stomping on the rock where we were standing. "The night is out there."

He pointed to the darkness all around us.

He then checked my carrying net to see if the food gourds and my writing pads were secured and in a soft voice said that a warrior always made sure that everything was in proper order, not because he believed that he was going to survive the ordeal he was about to undertake, but because that was part of his impeccable behavior.

Instead of making me feel relieved, his admonitions created the complete certainty that my doom was approaching. I wanted to weep. Don Juan was, I was sure, completely aware of the effect of his words.

"Trust your personal power," he said in my ear. "That's all one has in this whole mysterious world."

He pulled me gently and we started to walk. He took the lead a couple of steps ahead of me. I followed him with my eyes fixed on the ground. Somehow I did not dare to look around; and focusing my sight on the ground made me feel strangely calm; it almost mesmerized me.

After a short walk don Juan stopped. He whispered that total darkness was near and that he was going to get ahead of me; but was going to give me his position by imitating the cry of a specific small owl. He reminded me that I already knew that his particular imitation was raspy at the beginning and then it became as mellow as the cry of a real owl. He warned me to be deadly aware of other owl cries which did not bear that mark.

By the time don Juan finished giving me all those instructions I was practically panic-stricken. I grabbed him by the arm and would not let go. It took two or three minutes for me to calm myself enough so I could articulate my words. A nervous ripple ran along my stomach and abdomen and kept me from talking coherently.

In a calm soft voice he urged me to get hold of myself, because the darkness was like the wind, an unknown entity at large that could trick me if I was not careful. And I had to be perfectly calm in order to deal with it.

"You must let yourself go so your personal power will merge with the power of the night," he said in my ear.

He said he was going to move ahead of me and I had another attack of irrational fear.

"This is insane," I protested.

Don Juan did not get angry or impatient. He laughed quietly and said something in my ear which I did not quite understand.

"What did you say?" I said loudly through chattering teeth.

Don Juan put his hand over my mouth and whispered that a warrior acted as if he knew what he was doing, when in effect he knew nothing. He repeated one statement three or four times, as if he wanted me to memorize it. He said, "A warrior is impeccable when he trusts his personal power regardless of whether it is small or enormous."

After a short wait he asked me if I was all right. I nodded and he went swiftly out of sight with hardly a sound.

I tried to look around. I seemed to be standing in an area of thick vegetation. All I could distinguish was the dark mass of shrubs, or perhaps small trees. I concentrated my attention on sounds, but nothing was outstanding. The whizzing of the wind muffled every other sound except the sporadic piercing cries of large owls and the whistling of other birds.

I waited for a while in a state of utmost attention. And then came the raspy prolonged cry of a small owl. I had no doubt it was don Juan. It came from a place behind me. I turned around and began to walk in that direction. I moved slowly because I felt inextricably encumbered by the darkness.

I walked for perhaps ten minutes. Suddenly some dark mass jumped in front of me. I screamed and fell backward on my seat. My ears began buzzing. The fright was so great that it cut my wind. I had to open my mouth to breathe.

"Stand up," don Juan said softly. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just came to meet you."

He said that he had been watching my crappy way of walking and that when I moved in the darkness I looked like a crippled old lady trying to tiptoe between mud puddles. He found this image funny and laughed out loud.

He then proceeded to demonstrate a special way of walking in the darkness, a way which he called "the gait of power." He stooped over in front of me and made me run my hands over his back and knees, in order to get an idea of the position of his body. Don Juan's trunk was slightly bent forward, but his spine was straight. His knees were also slightly bent.

He walked slowly in front of me so I could take notice that he raised his knees almost to his chest every time he took a step. And then he actually ran out of sight and came back again. I could not conceive how he could run in total darkness.

"The gait of power is for running at night," he whispered in my ear.

He urged me to try it myself. I told him that I was sure I would break my legs falling into a crevice or a rock. Don Juan very calmly said that the "gait of power" was completely safe.

I pointed out that the only way I could understand his acts was by assuming he knew those hills to perfection and thus could avoid the pitfalls.

Don Juan took my head in his hands and whispered forcefully, "This is the night! And it is power!" He let go of my head and then added in a soft voice that at night the world was different, and that his ability to run in the darkness had nothing to do with his knowledge of those hills. He said that the key to it was to let one's personal power flow out freely, so it could merge with the power of the night, and that once that power took over there was no chance for a slip-up. He added, in a tone of utmost seriousness, that if I doubted it I should consider for a moment what was taking place. For a man of his age to run in those hills at that hour would be suicidal if the power of the night was not guiding him.

"Look!" he said and ran swiftly out into the darkness and came back again.

The way his body moved was so extraordinary that I could not believe what I was seeing. He sort of jogged on the same spot for a moment The manner in which he lifted his legs reminded me of a sprinter doing preliminary warm-up exercises.

He then told me to follow him. I did it with utter constraint and uneasiness. With extreme care I tried to look where I was stepping but it was impossible to judge distance. Don Juan came back and jogged by my side. He whispered that I had to abandon myself to the power of the night and trust the little bit of personal power that I had, or I would never be able to move with freedom, and that the darkness was encumbering only because I relied on my sight for everything I did, not knowing that another way to move was to let power be the guide.

I tried various times without any success. I simply could not let go. The fear of injuring my legs was overpowering. Don Juan ordered me to keep on moving in the. same spot and to try to feel as if I were actually using the "gait of power."

He then said that he was going to run ahead and that I should wait for his owl's cry. He disappeared in the darkness before I could say anything. I closed my eyes at times and jogged on the same spot with my knees and trunk bent for perhaps an hour. Little by little my tension began to ease up until I was fairly comfortable. Then I heard don Juan's cry.

I ran five or six yards in the direction where the cry came from, trying to "abandon myself," as don Juan had suggested. But stumbling into a bush immediately brought back my feelings of insecurity.

Don Juan was waiting for me and corrected my posture. He insisted I should first curl my fingers against my palms, stretching out the thumb and index of each hand. Then he said that in his opinion I was just indulging myself in my feelings of inadequacy, since I knew for a fact I could always see fairly well, no matter how dark the night was, if I did not focus on anything but kept scanning the ground right in front of me. The "gait of power" was similar to finding a place to rest. Both entailed a sense of abandon, and a sense of trust. The "gait of power" required that one keep the eyes on the ground directly in front, because even a glance to either side would produce an alteration in the flow of movement. He explained that bending the trunk forward was necessary in order to lower the eyes, and the reason for lifting the knees up to the chest was because the steps had to be very short and safe. He warned me that I was going to stumble a great deal at first but he assured me that with practice I could run as swiftly and as safely as I could in the daytime.

For hours I tried to imitate his movements and get into the mood he recommended. He would very patiently jog on the same spot in front of me, or he would take off in a short run and return to where I was, so I could see how he moved. He would even push me and make me run a few yards.

Then he took off and called me with a series of owl cries. In some inexplicable way I moved with an unexpected degree of self-confidence. To my knowledge I had done nothing to warrant that feeling, but my body seemed to be cognizant of things without thinking about them. For example, I could not really see the jagged rocks in my way, but my body always managed to step on the edges and never in the crevices, except for a few mishaps when I lost my balance because I became distracted. The degree of concentration needed to keep scanning the area directly in front had to be total. As don Juan had warned me, any slight glance to the side or too far ahead altered the flow.

I located don Juan after a long search. He was sitting by some dark shapes that seemed to be trees. He came towards me and said that I was doing very well, but it was time to quit because he had been using his whistle long enough and was sure that by then it could be imitated by others.

I agreed that it was time to stop. I was nearly exhausted by my attempts. I felt relieved and asked him who would imitate his cry.

"Powers, allies, spirits, who knows?" he said in a whisper.

He explained that those "entities of the night" usually made very melodious sounds but were at a great disadvantage in reproducing the raspiness of human cries or bird whistlings. He cautioned me to always stop moving if I ever heard such a sound and to keep in mind all he had said, because at some other time I might need to make the proper identification. In a reassuring tone he said that I had a very good idea what the "gait of power" was like, and that in order to master it I needed only a slight push, which I could get on another occasion when we ventured again into the night. He patted me on the shoulder and announced that he was ready to leave.

"Let's get out of here," he said and began running.

"Wait! Wait!" I screamed frantically. "Let's walk."

Don Juan stopped and took off his hat.

"Golly!" he said in a tone of perplexity. "We're in a fix. You know that I cannot walk in the dark. I can only run. I'll break my legs if I walk."

I had the feeling he was grinning when he said that, although I could not see his face.

He added in a confidential tone that he was too old to walk and the little bit of the "gait of power" that I had learned that night had to be stretched to meet the occasion.

"If we don't use the 'gait of power' we will be mowed down like grass," he whispered in my ear.

"By whom?"

"There are things in the night that act on people," he whispered in a tone that sent chills through my body.

He said that it was not important that I keep up with him, because he was going to give repeated signals of four owl cries at a time so I could follow him.

I suggested that we should stay in those hills until dawn and then leave. He retorted in a very dramatic tone that to stay there would be suicidal; and even if we came out alive, the night would have drained our personal power to the point that we could not avoid being the victims of the first hazard of the day.

"Let's not waste any more time," he said with a note of urgency in his voice. "Let's get out of here."

He reassured me that he would try to go as slowly as possible. His final instructions were that I should try not to utter a sound, not even a gasp, no matter what happened. He gave me the general direction we were going to go in and began running at a markedly slower pace. I followed him, but no matter how slow he moved I could not keep up with him, and he soon disappeared in the darkness ahead of me.

After I was alone I became aware that I had adopted a fairly fast walk without realizing it. And that came as a shock to me. I tried to maintain that pace for a long while and then I heard don Juan's call a little bit to my right. He whistled four times in succession.

After a very short while I again heard his owl cry, this time to my far right. In order to follow it I had to make a forty-five-degree turn. I began to move in the new direction, expecting that the other three cries of the set would give me a better orientation.

I heard a new whistle, which placed don Juan almost in the direction where we had started. I stopped and listened. I heard a very sharp noise a short distance away. Something like the sound of two rocks being struck against each other. I strained to listen and detected a series of soft noises, as if two rocks were being struck gently. There was another owl's cry and then I knew what don Juan had meant. There was something truly melodious about it. It was definitely longer and even more mellow than a real owl's.

I felt a strange sensation of fright. My stomach contracted as if something were pulling me down from the middle part of my body. I turned around and started to semi-jog in the opposite direction.

I heard a faint owl cry in the distance. There was a rapid succession of three more cries. They were don Juan's. I ran in their direction. I felt that he must have been a good quarter of a mile away and if he kept up that pace I would soon be inextricably alone in those hills. I could not understand why don Juan would run ahead, when he could have run around me, if he needed to keep that pace.

I noticed then that there seemed to be something moving with me to my left. I could almost see it in the extreme periphery of my visual field. I was about to panic, but a sobering thought crossed my mind. I could not possibly see anything in the dark. I wanted to stare in that direction but I was afraid to lose my momentum.

Another owl cry jolted me out of my deliberations. It came from my left. I did not follow it because it was without a doubt the most sweet and melodious cry I had ever heard. It did not frighten me though. There was something very appealing, or perhaps haunting, or even sad about it.

Then a very swift dark mass crossed from left to right ahead of me. The suddenness of its movement made me look ahead, I lost my balance and crashed noisily against some shrubs. I fell down on my side and then I heard the melodious cry a few steps to my left. I stood up, but before I could start moving forward again there was another cry, more demanding and compelling than the first.  It was as if something there wanted me to stop and listen. The sound of the owl cry was so prolonged and gentle that it eased my fears. I would have actually stopped had I not heard at that precise moment don Juan's four raspy cries. They seemed to be nearer. I jumped and took off in that direction.

After a moment I noticed again a certain flicker or a wave in the darkness to my left. It was not a sight proper, but rather a feeling, and yet I was almost sure I was perceiving it with my eyes. It moved faster than I did, and again it crossed from left to right, making me lose my balance. This time I did not fall down, and strangely enough not falling down annoyed me. I suddenly became angry and the incongruency of my feelings threw me into true panic. I tried to accelerate my pace. I waited to give out an owl cry myself to let don Juan know where I was, but I did not dare to disobey his instructions.

At that moment some gruesome thing came to my attention. There was actually something like an animal to my left, almost touching me. I jumped involuntarily and veered to my right. The fright almost suffocated me. I was so intensely gripped by fear that there were no thoughts in my mind as I moved in the darkness as fast as I could. My fear seemed to be a bodily sensation that had nothing to do with my thoughts. I found that condition very unusual. In the course of my life, my fears had always been mounted on an intellectual matrix and had been engendered by threatening social situations, or by people behaving towards me in dangerous ways. This time, however, my fear was a true novelty. It came from an unknown part of the world and hit me in an unknown part of myself.

I heard an owl cry very close and slightly to my left. I could not catch the details of its pitch, but it seemed to be don Juan's. It was not melodious. I slowed down. Another cry followed. The raspiness of don Juan's whistles was there, so I moved faster. A third whistle came from a very short distance away. I could distinguish a dark mass of rocks or perhaps trees. I heard another owl's cry and I thought that don Juan was waiting for me because we were out of the field of danger. I was almost at the edge of the darker area when a fifth cry froze me on the spot. I strained to see ahead into the dark area, but a sudden rustling sound to my left made me turn around in time to notice a black object, blacker than the surroundings, rolling or sliding by my side. I gasped and jumped away. I heard a clicking sound, as if someone were smacking his lips, and then a very large dark mass lurched out of the darker area. It was square, like a door, perhaps eight to ten feet high.

The suddenness of its appearance made me scream. For a moment my fright was all out of proportion, but a second later I found myself awesomely calm, staring at the dark shape.

My reactions were, as far as I was concerned, another total novelty. Some part of myself seemed to pull me towards the dark area with an eerie insistence, while another part of me resisted. It was as if I wanted to find out for sure on the one hand, and on the other I wanted to run hysterically out of there.

I barely heard don Juan's owl cries. They seemed to be very close by and they seemed to be frantic; they were longer and raspier, as though he was whistling while he ran towards me.

Suddenly I seemed to regain control of myself and was able to turn around and for a moment I ran just as don Juan had been wanting me to.

"Don Juan!" I shouted when I found him.

He put his hand on my mouth and signaled me to follow and we both jogged at a very comfortable pace until we came to the sandstone ledge where we had been before.

We sat in absolute silence on the ledge for about an hour, until dawn. Then we ate food from the gourds. Don Juan said that we had to remain on the ledge until midday, and that we were not going to sleep at all but were going to talk as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

He asked me to relate in detail everything that had happened to me from the moment he had left me. When I concluded my narration he stayed quiet for a long time. He seemed to be immersed in deep thought.

"It doesn't look too good," he finally said. "What happened to you last night was very serious, so serious that you cannot venture into the night alone any more.  From now on the entities of the night won't leave you alone."

"What happened to me last night, don Juan?"

"You stumbled on some entities which are in the world, and which act on people. You know nothing about them because you have never encountered them. Perhaps it would be more proper to call them entities of the mountains; they don't really belong to the night. I call them entities of the night because one can perceive them in the darkness with greater ease. They are here, around us at all times. In daylight, however, it is more difficult to perceive them, simply because the world is familiar to us, and that which is familiar takes precedence. In the darkness, on the other hand, everything is equally strange and very few things take precedence, so we are more susceptible to those entities at night."

"But are they real, don Juan?"

"Of course! They are so real that ordinarily they kill people, especially those who stray into the wilderness and have no personal power."

"If you knew they were so dangerous, why did you leave me alone there?"

"There is only one way to learn, and that way is to get down to business. To only talk about power is useless. If you want to know what power is, and if you want to stress it you must tackle everything yourself.

"The road to knowledge and power is very difficult and very long. You may have noticed that I have not let you venture into the darkness by yourself until last night. You did not have enough power to do that. Now you do have enough to wage a good battle, but not enough to stay in the dark by yourself."

"What would happen if I did?"

"You'll die. The entities of the night will crush you like a bug."

"Does that mean that I cannot spend a night by myself?"

"You can spend the night by yourself in your bed, but not in the mountains."

"What about the flatlands?"

"It applies only to the wilderness, where there are no people around, especially the wilderness in high mountains. Since the natural abodes of the entities of the night are rocks and crevices, you cannot go to the mountains from now on unless you have stored enough personal power."

"But how can I store personal power?"

"You are doing it by living the way I have recommended. Little by little you are plugging up all your points of drainage. You don't have to be deliberate about it, because power always finds a way. Take me as an example. I didn't know I was storing power when I first began to learn the ways of a warrior. Just like you, I  thought I wasn't doing anything in particular, but that was not so. Power has the peculiarity of being unnoticeable when it is being stored."

I asked him to explain how he had arrived at the conclusion that it was dangerous for me to stay by myself in the darkness.

"The entities of the night moved along your left," he said. "They were trying to merge with your death. Especially the door that you saw. It was an opening, you know, and it would have pulled you until you had been forced to cross it. And that would have been your end."

I mentioned, in the best way I could, that I thought it was very strange that things always happened when he was around, and that it was as if he had been concocting all the events himself. The times I had been alone in the wilderness at night had always been perfectly nor mal and uneventful. I had never experienced shadows or strange noises. In fact, I had never been frightened by anything.

Don Juan chuckled softly and said that everything was proof he had enough personal power to call a myriad of things to his aid.

I had the feeling he perhaps was hinting that he actually had called on some people as his confederates.

Don Juan seemed to have read my thoughts and laughed out loud.

"Don't tax yourself with explanations," he said. "What I said makes no sense to you simply because you still don't have enough personal power. Yet you have more than when you started, so things have begun to happen to you. You already had a powerful encounter with the fog and lightning. It is not important that you understand what happened to you that night. What's important is that you have acquired the memory of it. The bridge and everything else you saw that night will be repeated some day when you have enough personal power."

"For what purpose would all that be repeated, don Juan?"

"I don't know. I am not you. Only you can answer that. We are all different. That's why I had to leave you by yourself last night, although I knew it was mortally dangerous; you had to test yourself against those entities. The reason I chose the owl's cry was because owls are the entities' messengers. To imitate the cry of an owl brings them out. They became dangerous to you not because they are naturally malevolent but because you were not impeccable. There is something in you that is very chintzy and I know what it is. You are just humoring me. You have been humoring everybody all along and, of course, that places you automatically above everyone and everything. But you know yourself that that cannot be so. You are only a man, and your life is too brief to encompass all the wonders and all the horrors of this marvelous world. Therefore, your humoring is chintzy; it cuts you down to a crappy size."

I wanted to protest. Don Juan had nailed me, as he had done dozens of times before. For a moment I became angry. But, as it had happened before, writing detached me enough so I could remain impassive.

"I think I have a cure for it," don Juan went on after a long interval. "Even  you would agree with me if you could remember what you did last night. You ran as fast as any sorcerer only when your opponent became unbearable. We both know that and I believe I have already found a worthy opponent for you."

"What are you going to do, don Juan?"

He did not answer. He stood up and stretched his body. He seemed to contract every muscle. He ordered me to do the same.

"You must stretch your body many times during the day," he said. "The more times the better, but only after a long period of work or a long period of rest."

"What kind of opponent are you going to find for me?" I asked..

"Unfortunately only our fellow men are our worthy opponents," he said. "Other entities have no volition of their own and one must go to meet them and lure them out. Our fellow men, on the contrary, are relentless."

"We have talked long enough," don Juan said in an abrupt tone and turned to me. "Before we leave you must do one more thing, the most important of all. I am going to tell you something right now to set your mind at ease about why you are here. The reason you keep on coming to see me is very simple; every time you have seen me your body has learned certain things, even against your desire. And finally your body now needs to come back to me to learn more. Let's say that your body knows that it is going to die, even though you never think about it. So I've been telling your body that I too am going to die and before I do I would like to show your body certain things, things which you cannot give to your body yourself. For example, your body needs fright. It likes it. Your body needs the darkness and the wind. Your body now knows the gait of power and can't wait to try it. So let's say then that your body returns to see me because I am its friend."

Don Juan remained silent for a long while. He seemed to be struggling with his thoughts.

"I've told you that the secret of a strong body is not in what you do to it but what you don't do," he finally said. "Now it is time for you not to do what you always do. Sit here until we leave and not-do."

"I don't follow you, don Juan."

He put his hands over my notes and took them away from me. He carefully closed the pages of my notebook, secured it with a rubber band, and then threw it like a disk far into the chaparral.

I was shocked and began to protest but he put his hand over my mouth. He pointed to a large bush and told me to fix my attention not on the leaves but on the shadows of the leaves. He said that running in the darkness did not have to be spurred by fear but could be a very natural reaction of a jubilant body that knew how "to not do." He repeated over and over in a whisper in my right ear that "to not do what I knew how to do" was the key to power. In the case of looking at a tree, what I knew how to do was to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves or the spaces in between the leaves were never my concern. His last admonitions were to start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work my way to the whole tree, and not to let my eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power was to allow the body to "not-do."

Perhaps it was because of my fatigue or my nervous excitation, but I became so immersed in the shadows of the leaves that by the time don Juan stood up I could almost group the dark masses of shadows as effectively as I normally grouped the foliage. The total effect was startling. I told don Juan that I would like to stay longer. He laughed and patted me on my hat.

"I've told you," he said. "The body likes things like this."

He then said that I should let my stored power guide me through the bushes to my notebook. He gently pushed me into the chaparral. I walked aimlessly for a moment and then I came upon it. I thought that I must have unconsciously memorized the direction in which don Juan had thrown it. He explained the event, saying that I went directly to the notebook because my body had been soaked for hours in "not-doing."

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