THE THIRD SERIES
The Series of the Five Concerns: The Westwood Series
The Fourth Group:
Inner Silence
Don Juan said that inner silence was the state most avidly sought
by the shamans of ancient Mexico. He defined it as a natural state of human
perception in which thoughts are blocked off and all of man's faculties
operate from a level of awareness which doesn't require the utilization
of our daily cognitive system.
Inner silence has always been associated with darkness, for the
shamans of don Juan's lineage, perhaps because human perception, deprived
of its habitual companion, the internal dialogue, falls into something
that resembles a dark pit. He said that the body functions as usual, but
awareness becomes sharper. Decisions are instantaneous, and seem to stem
from a special sort of knowledge which is deprived of thought-verbalizations.
Human perception functioning in a condition of inner silence, according
to don Juan, is capable of reaching indescribable levels. Some of those
levels of perception are worlds in themselves, and not at all like the
worlds reached through dreaming. They are indescribable states,
inexplicable in terms of the linear paradigms that the habitual state of
human perception employs for explaining the universe.
Inner silence, in don Juan's understanding, is the matrix for a
gigantic step of evolution: silent knowledge, or the level of human
awareness where knowing is automatic and instantaneous. Knowledge at this
level is not the product of cerebral cogitation or logical induction and
deduction, or of generalizations based on similarities and dissimilarities.
There is nothing a priori at the level of silent knowledge, nothing
that could constitute a body of knowledge, for everything is imminently
now. Complex pieces of information could be grasped without any
cognitive preliminaries.
Don Juan believed that silent knowledge was insinuated to early
man, but that early man was not really the possessor of silent knowledge.
Such an insinuation was infinitely stronger than what modern man experiences,
where the bulk of knowledge is the product of rote learning. It is a sorcerers'
axiom that although we have lost that insinuation, the avenue that leads
to silent knowledge will always be open to man by means of inner
silence.
Don Juan Matus taught the hard line of his lineage: that inner silence
must be gained by a consistent pressure of discipline. It has to be accrued
or stored, bit by bit, second by second. In other words, one has to force
oneself to be silent, even if it is only for a few seconds. According don
Juan, it was common knowledge among sorcerers that if one persists in this,
persistence overcomes habit, and thus, it is possible to arrive at a threshold
of accrued seconds or minutes, which differs from person to person. If
the threshold of inner silence is ten minutes for a given individual,
for instance, then once this threshold is reached, inner silence
happens by itself, of its own accord, so to speak.
I was warned beforehand that there was no possible way of knowing what
my individual threshold might be, and that the only way of finding this
out was through direct experience. This is exactly what happened to me.
Following don Juan's suggestion, I had persisted in forcing myself to remain
silent, and one day, while walking at UCLA, I reached my mysterious threshold.
I knew I had reached it because in one instant, I experienced something
don Juan had described at length to me. He had called it stopping the
world. In the blink of an eye, the world ceased to be what it was,
and for the first time in my life, I became conscious that I was seeing
energy as it flowed in the universe. I had to sit down on some brick steps.
I knew that I was sitting on some brick steps, but I knew it only intellectually,
through memory. Experientially, I was resting on energy. I myself was energy,
and so was everything around me. I had canceled out my interpretation system.
After seeing energy directly, I realized something which became
the horror of my day, something that no one could explain to me satisfactorily
except don Juan. I became conscious that although I was seeing for
the first time in my life, I had been seeing energy as it flows
in the universe all my life, but I had not been conscious of it. To see
energy as it flows in the universe was not the novelty. The novelty
was the query that arose with such fury that it made me surface back into
the world of everyday life. I asked myself what had been keeping me from
realizing that I had been seeing energy as it flows in the universe
all my life.
"There are two issues at stake here," don Juan explained to me, when I
asked him about this maddening contradiction. "One is general awareness.
The other is particular, deliberate consciousness. Every human being in
the world is aware, in general terms, of seeing energy as it flows
in the universe. However, only sorcerers are particularly and deliberately
conscious of it. To become conscious of something that you are generally
aware of requires energy, and the iron-hand discipline needed to get it.
Your inner silence, the product of discipline and energy, bridged
the gap between general awareness and particular consciousness."
Don Juan stressed, in every way he was able, the value of a pragmatic attitude
in order to buttress the advent of inner silence. He defined a pragmatic
attitude as the capacity to absorb any contingency that might appear along
the way. He himself was, to me, the living example of such an attitude.
There wasn't any uncertainty or liability that his mere presence would
not dispel.
He reiterated every time he could that the effects of inner silence
were very unsettling, and that the only deterrent to this condition
was the pragmatic attitude which was the product of a superbly pliable,
agile, strong body. He said that for sorcerers, the physical body was the
only entity that made any sense to them, and that there was no such thing
as a dualism between body and mind. He further stated that the physical
body involved both the body and the mind as we knew them, and that in order
to counterbalance the physical body as a holistic unit, sorcerers considered
another configuration of energy which was reached through inner silence:
the energy body. He explained that what I had experienced at the
moment in which I had stopped the world was the resurgence of my
energy body, and that this configuration of energy was the one which
had always been able to see energy as it flowed in the universe.
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