JOURNEY TO IXTLAN -- THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN

I had the opportunity of discussing my two previous visits to don Juan with the friend who had put us in contact. It was his opinion that I was wasting my time. I related to him, in every detail, the scope of our conversation. He thought I was exaggerating and romanticizing a silly old fogy.

There was very little room in me for romanticizing such a preposterous old man. I sincerely felt that his criticism about my personality had seriously undermined my liking him. Yet I had to admit that they had always been, apropos, sharply delineated, and true to the letter.

The crux of my dilemma at that point was my unwillingness to accept that don Juan was very capable of disrupting all my preconceptions about the world, and my unwillingness to agree with my friend who believed that "the old Indian was just nuts."

I felt compelled to pay him another visit before I made up my mind.

Wednesday, December 28,1960

Immediately after I arrived at his house he took me for a walk in the desert chaparral. He did not even look at the bag of groceries that I had brought him. He seemed to have been waiting for me.

We walked for hours. He did not collect or show me any plants. He did, however, teach me an "appropriate form of walking." He said that I had to curl my fingers gently as I walked so I would keep my attention on the trail and the surroundings. He claimed that my ordinary way of walking was debilitating and that one should never  carry anything in the hands. If things had to be carried one should use a knapsack or any sort of carrying net or shoulder bag. His idea was that by forcing the hands into a specific position one was capable of greater stamina and greater awareness.

I saw no point in arguing and curled my fingers as he had prescribed and kept on walking. My awareness was in no way different, nor was my stamina.

We started our hike in the morning and we stopped to rest around noon. I was perspiring and tried to drink from my canteen, but he stopped me by saying that it was better to have only a sip of water. He cut some leaves from a small yellowish bush and chewed them. He gave me some and remarked that they were excellent, and if I chewed them slowly my thirst would vanish. It did not, but I was not uncomfortable either.

He seemed to have read my thoughts and explained that I had not felt the benefits of the "right way of walking" or the benefits of chewing the leaves because I was young and strong and my body did not notice anything because it was a bit stupid.

He laughed. I was not in a laughing mood and that seemed to amuse him even more. He corrected his previous statement, saying that my body was not really stupid but somehow dormant.

At that moment an enormous crow flew right over us, cawing. That startled me and I began to laugh. I thought that the occasion called for laughter, but to my utter amazement he shook my arm vigorously and hushed me up. He had a most serious expression.

"That was not a joke," he said severely, as if I knew what he was talking about.

I asked for an explanation. I told him that it was incongruous that my laughing at the crow had made him angry when we had laughed at the coffee percolator.

"What you saw was not just a crow!" he exclaimed.

"But I saw it and it was a crow," I insisted.

"You saw nothing, you fool," he said in a gruff voice.

His rudeness was uncalled for. I told him that I did not like to make people angry and that perhaps it would be better if I left, since he did not seem to be in a mood to have company.

He laughed uproariously, as if I were a clown performing for him. My annoyance and embarrassment grew in proportion.

"You're very violent," he commented casually. "You're taking yourself too seriously."

"But weren't you doing the same?" I interjected. "Taking yourself seriously when you got angry at me?"

He said that to get angry at me was the farthest thing from his mind. He looked at me piercingly.

"What you saw was not an agreement from the world," he said. "Crows flying or cawing are never an agreement. That was an omen!"

"An omen of what?"

"A very important indication about you," he replied cryptically.

At that very instant the wind blew the dry branch of a bush right to our feet.

"That was an agreement!" he exclaimed and looked at me with shiny eyes and broke into a belly laugh.

I had the feeling that he was teasing me by making up the rules of his strange game as we went along, thus it was all right for him to laugh, but not for me. My annoyance mushroomed again and I told him what I thought of him.

He was not cross or offended at all. He laughed and his laughter caused me even more anguish and frustration. I thought that he was deliberately humiliating me. I decided right then that I had had my fill of "field work."

I stood up and said that I wanted to start walking back to his house because I had to leave for Los Angeles.

"Sit down!" he said imperatively: "You get peeved like an old lady. You cannot leave now, because we're not through yet."

I hated him. I thought he was a contemptuous man.

He began to sing an idiotic Mexican folk song. He was obviously imitating some popular singer. He elongated certain syllables and contracted others and made the song into a most farcical affair. It was so comical that I ended up laughing.

"You see, you laugh at the stupid song," he said. "But the man who sings it that way and those who pay to listen to him are not laughing; they think it is serious."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

I thought he had deliberately concocted the example to tell me that I had laughed at the crow because I had not taken it seriously, the same way I had not taken the song seriously. But he baffled me again: He said I was like the singer and the people who liked his songs, conceited and deadly serious about some nonsense that no one in his right mind should give a damn about.

He then recapitulated, as if to refresh my memory, all he had said before on the topic of "learning about plants." He stressed emphatically that if I really wanted to learn, I had to remodel most of my behavior.

My sense of annoyance grew, until I had to make a supreme effort to even take notes.

"You take yourself too seriously," he said slowly. "You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything. You're so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don't go your way.  I suppose you think that shows you have character. That's nonsense! You're weak, and conceited!"

I tried to stage a protest but he did not budge. He pointed out that in the course of my life I had not ever finished anything because of that sense of disproportionate importance that I attached to myself.

I was flabbergasted at the certainty with which he made his statements.  They were true, of course, and that made me feel not only angry but also threatened.

"Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history," he said in a dramatic tone.

I certainly did not want to argue with him. It was obvious that I was at a terrible disadvantage; he was not going to walk back to his house until he was ready and I didn't not know the way. I had to stay with him.

He made a strange and sudden movement, he sort of sniffed the air around him, his head shook slightly and rhythmically. He seemed to be in a state of unusual alertness. He turned and stared at me with a look of bewilderment and curiosity. His eyes swept up and down my body as if he were looking for something specific; then he stood up abruptly and began to walk fast. He was almost running. I followed him. He kept a very accelerated pace for nearly an hour.

Finally he stopped by a rocky hill and we sat in the shade of a bush. The trotting had exhausted me completely although my mood was better. It was strange the way I had changed. I felt almost elated, but when we had started to trot, after our argument, I was furious with him.

"This is very weird," I said, "but I feel really good."

I heard the cawing of a crow in the distance. He lifted his finger to his right ear and smiled.

"That was an omen," he said.

A small rock tumbled downhill and made a crashing sound when it landed in the chaparral.

He laughed out loud and pointed his finger in the direction of the sound.

"And that was an agreement," he said.

He then asked me if I was ready to talk about my self importance. I laughed; my feeling of anger seemed so far away that I could not even conceive how I had become so cross with him.

"I can't understand what's happening to me," I said. "I got angry and now I don't know why I am not angry any more."

"The world around us is very mysterious," he said, "It doesn't yield its secrets easily."

I liked his cryptic statements. They were challenging and mysterious. I could not determine whether they were filled with hidden meanings or whether they were just plain nonsense.

"If you ever come back to the desert here," he said, "stay away from that rocky hill where we stopped today. Avoid it like the plague."

"Why? What's the matter?"

"This is not the time to explain it," he said. "Now we are concerned with losing self-importance. As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else."

He examined me for a moment.

"I am going to talk to my little friend here," he said, pointing to a small plant.

He kneeled in front of it and began to caress it and to talk to it.  I did not understand what he was saying at first, but then he switched languages and talked to the plant in Spanish. He babbled inanities for a while. Then he stood up.

"It doesn't matter what you say to a plant," he said. "You can just as well make up words; what's important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal."

He explained that a man who gathers plants must apologize every time for taking them and must assure them that someday his own body will serve as food for them.

"So, all in all, the plants and ourselves are even," he said. "Neither we nor they are more or less important.

"Come on, talk to the little plant," he urged me. "Tell it that you don't feel important any more."

"I went as far as kneeling in front of the plant but I could not bring myself to speak to it I felt ridiculous and laughed. I was not angry, however.

Don Juan patted me on the back and said that it was all right, that at least I had contained my temper.

"From now on talk to the little plants," he said. "'Talk until you lose all sense of importance. Talk to them until you can do it in front of others.

"Go to those hills over there and practice by yourself."

I asked if it was all right to talk to the plants silently, in my mind.

He laughed and tapped my head.

"No'" he said. "You must talk to them in a loud and clear voice if you want them to answer you."

I walked to the area in question, laughing to myself about his eccentricities. I even tried to talk to the plants, but my feeling of being ludicrous was overpowering.

After what I thought was an appropriate wait I went back to where don Juan was. I had the certainty that he knew I had not talked to the plants.

He did not look at me. He signaled me to sit down by him.

"Watch me carefully," he said. "I'm going to have a talk with my little friend."

He kneeled down in front of a small plant and for a few minutes he moved and contorted his body, talking and laughing.

I thought he was out of his mind.

"This little plant told me to tell you that she is good to eat," he said as he got up from his kneeling position. "She said that a handful of them would keep a man healthy. She also said that there is a batch of them growing over there."

Don Juan pointed to an area on a hillside perhaps two hundred yards away.

"Let's go and find out," he said.

I laughed at his histrionics. I was sure we would find the plants, because he was an expert in the terrain and knew where the edible and medicinal plants were.

As we walked towards the area in question he told me casually that I should take notice of the plant because it was both a food and a medicine.

I asked him, half in jest, if the plant had just told him that. He stopped walking and examined me with an air of disbelief. He shook his head from side to side.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, laughing. "Your cleverness makes you more silly than I thought. How can the little plant tell me now what I've known all my life?"

He proceeded then to explain that he knew all along the different properties of that specific plant, and that the plant had just told him that there was a batch of them growing in the area he had pointed to, and that she did not mind if he told me that.

Upon arriving at the hillside I found a whole cluster of the same plants. I wanted to laugh but he did not give me time. He wanted me to thank the batch of plants. I felt excruciatingly self-conscious and could not bring my self to do it.

He smiled benevolently and made another of his cryptic statements. He repeated it three or four times as if to give me time to figure out its meaning.

"The world around us is a mystery," he said. "And men are no better than anything else. If a little plant is generous with us we must thank her, or perhaps she will not let us go."

The way he looked at me when he said that gave me a chill. I hurriedly leaned over the plants and said, "Thank you," in a loud voice.

He began to laugh in controlled and quiet spurts.

We walked for another hour and then started on our way back to his house. At a certain time I dropped behind and he had to wait for me. He checked my fingers to see if I had curled them. I had not. He told me imperatively that whenever I walked. with him I had to observe and copy his mannerisms or not come along at all.

"I can't be waiting for you as though you're a child," he said in a scolding tone.

That statement sunk me into the' depths of embarrassment and bewilderment. How could it be possible that such an old man could walk so much better than I.  I thought 1 was athletic and strong, and yet he had actually had to wait for me to catch up with him.

I curled my fingers and strangely enough I was able to keep his tremendous pace without any effort. In fact, at times I felt that my hands were pulling me forward.

I felt elated. I was quite happy walking inanely with the strange old Indian. I began to talk and asked repeatedly if he would show me some peyote plants. He looked at me but did not say a word.

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