Part 2 of 2
like “winds.” He cannot deliberately seek them. Like the rabbits and rattlesnakes that the sorcerer hunts, they must come to him. The sorcerer needs them for his final effort in the wrestling match with the ally. Indeed, it is almost suicidal for the sorcerer to first confront the ally directly without the help of the women. Like the points on the compass, the women surround the sorcerer. There are four of them. These are the sorcerer’s “winds.” To the north of him is the woman who is his shield, his protector. In the back of him, to the south, is the warm wind, the joker. The joker represents the warmth and lightness of spring. Her presence moderates the devastating north wind. To the west, introspection is represented by the spirit catcher. And completing the array is the weapon, to the east. The weapon is the “foremost authority,” the wind of “illumination.” It is in this position that the five of them, the sorcerer and his four winds, go forth across the plain situated somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, to confront the ally.
Carlos is deliberately vague about the location of this plain, but he assures me that “it exists" and that it is a real place." It is where the sorcerer must go to meet and wrestle with the ally.
When the women and the sorcerer come face to face with the ally, the women first bear the brunt of the ally’s attack. Moving first against the joker at the rear of the formation, the ally “flattens her to the ground”. The other women and the sorcerer must turn, as if in some macabre ballet, and point toward the struggling joker and the ally. They cannot go to her aid. One by one, the ally attacks the women, finally moving with tremendous force against the shield to the front of the sorcerer. Then he attacks the sorcerer himself head-on with a massive show of power. The sorcerer and the ally grapple with one another. If the sorcerer succeeds in wrestling the ally to the ground, he gains the power of the ally. But if he fails, he is spun by the ally.
Carlos talks about how don Genaro was spun by his ally. Don Genaro grappled with the ally, but from the moment he caught hold, he was spun about with great force. The ally literally “twirled” don Genaro like a top, spinning him through the air with great speed, finally dumping him to the ground far from his home in an alien place. It was then that don Genaro was forced to begin his journey home to Ixtlan. On the path, he met people who seemed to be people, but turned out to be phantoms. But don Genaro could never reach the end of his journey. He could never return to Ixtlan. His world had been spun by the ally. Don Genaro could never go home again. Indeed, he had lost his humanness. In truth, the phantoms that don Genaro met and continues to meet on his unceasing journey back to Ixtlan are not phantoms at all but real people. It is don Genaro who is no longer human. Neither is don Juan.
The sorcerer’s metaphor of “being spun” captures the sense of the transition from being an ordinary person who does not see to becoming the sorcerer who finally sees. But one becomes a sorcerer at an extraordinary cost. To lose one’s humanness means to leave behind everything that one holds dear. As don Juan told Carlos: “You are ready now to wrestle the ally. You will survive and the first thing that you will wish to do is to journey back to Los Angeles. But you will never get there. All of that will be lost forever to you. Everybody that you loved. Everything that you hated, wished for, held dear will have been left behind you.”
Carlos, in speaking of his own readiness to go to the plain of the ally, regrets that he has no winds of his own to go with him. He said: “Since I don’t have four winds, I’ll have to take the plunge by myself. I’ll do it when my body feels like it.” A rumor spread around school that Carlos’ teaching assistant had found a wind for him, a girl who was willing to go to the plain with Carlos to wrestle the ally. I didn’t believe it for a moment because the whole thing, according to Carlos, is very dangerous. The ally isn’t kidding when he attacks the winds. It can be fatal. I doubt that a woman would risk it. Carlos thought that he had attracted a wind once. But don Juan told him: “She is not a wind. She needs constant reinforcement. Either she needs a gigantic effort to change or you’ll have to leave her.” Don Juan had three winds when he tried to make it across the plain. He never made it. Carlos has no winds but he feels that he has to try it anyway, even if he gets spun by the ally and loses his humanness as a consequence.
Carlos identifies with another young sorcerer by the name of Pablito. “Pablito is charming, exquisite, funny, direct but yet not threatening to others. He is my size, my age. I watch his actions closely. Whatever he is doing, Pablito turns in an exquisite performance.” Perhaps that is why Pablito has already attracted three winds. Carlos insists. though, that this thing of winds is “not a sexual affair. It is an arrangement of power.” But even Pablito with all of his charm seems unable to come up with the fourth wind. Like don Juan, he seems stuck at three. Carlos says, “I don’t think Pablito will get the fourth one. He will have to leave the others behind and cross the plain by himself. Pablito is almost ready. I will witness his attempt to cross.”
Carlos seems conflicted about crossing the plain. He says: “I’m involved in too many things. Maybe this is how I keep putting it off.” On another occasion, he said: “I’m committed to my feelings. This is what makes me human, my feelings. I like to show my feelings, to be happy, sad, to love. Don Juan and don Genaro you see, they have no true feelings. Don Juan has no real compassion for me. He gives me his attention, that is all. He cannot give me his feelings because he can only approximate true human feelings. He and don Genaro have been spun. They have lost their humanness.” Carlos seems unsure that he is ready to pay the final price of seeing.
Don Genaro, however, insists that it is possible to make it across the plain and hence gain the powers of the ally but still retain one’s humanness. He says that he knew one warrior who made it across the plain. Carlos says: “Don Genaro is not kidding. It is inconceivable that he would lie to me. I will go to Mexico. I will sit under this tree and wait for this man to come to me. I’ll sit there for months if necessary. This man will come to me and tell me what this myth is all about.”
I became very curious about this one warrior who succeeded in making it across the plain. Was his success the reason why the sorcerers continue to make the attempt to risk their humanness in search of knowledge? Carlos told me that he didn’t think so. He said quite simply: “There is no other way for a man to live.” That phrase of don Juan’s and of Carlos’ has stuck in my mind. I hear Carlos saying it to me at peculiar times.
Once while shopping in Sears Roebuck I saw a man my age with two small children hanging on him. His wife was greedily rummaging in a bin of sale items, saying “Look at this! And this! And this !” The man said: “These goddamned kids are driving me crazy and you aren’t helping one bit!” Carlos’ phrase about the warrior’s way of life flashed through my head: “There is no other way for a man to live.” I went home thinking: “Each of us, in his or her way, in this culture ends up in Sears Roebuck.” My dissatisfactions with my own culture had always been extreme. As I got deeper into the world view of the Yaqui sorcerer, my sense of separation from my own culture became profound. I identified with Carlos. I sensed the anguish he must experience as a man caught between two cultures. Carlos has said: “my life is weird- more weird than it looks. I make an effort to present myself in a coherent fashion. But that is the way with the warrior. That is how he must function. He must present his coherent side.”
But I do not see Carlos as “weird.” Traveling the jammed freeways into Los Angeles, enduring yet another party at a friend’s house that goes nowhere, observing the restless, speeded, frenzied boogieing and aimless intensity of my friends, listening to the endless trash that pours out of L.A.'s top 40 stations, reading of the latest ecological horrors that threaten the very existence of human beings everywhere, and watching the terrifying life trip from youth to old age and finally death in American Society and other advanced societies, I sense the purity and beauty of the Yaqui way. I understand why Carlos must eventually risk his humanness in the final struggle with the ally on the plain. I too know what don Juan means when he says that “the art of the warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.”
Perhaps the time when I saw Carlos most clearly was when he took my friend Ruth and I and several others to a place of power high in the hills above Malibu. We had all agreed to meet in Ships restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles. There was a delightful incongruity about the whole thing. I mean when you stop and think about it, waiting for the sorcerer’s apprentice in the “chicken shack” of Ships really is far out! All those people stuffing their faces with fried chicken! When one of the kindly old ladies who works there as a hostess came up and asked if she could help us, the whole thing seemed so preposterous that I bit my cheeks to keep from laughing out loud. I ran out into the parking lot to wait for Carlos there. What could I have said to the waitress- “Oh no thank you, I’m just waiting for a sorcerer’s apprentice” ?
Anyway, it wasn’t long before Carlos came bouncing through the parking lot. He seemed filled with energy, enormously happy. It was obvious that he loved to visit the place of power. He explained that don Juan had seen this place in the hills above Malibu Canyon in a dream. It proved to be exactly as don Juan had described it to Carlos. A ring of massive boulders formed a perfect circle around a dense forest of chapparal. One of the boulders resembled a face pointing to the West toward the Pacific. The westward direction of the “face” boulder, according to Carlos, meant that this particular place of power was one of “introspection.” Yaqui sorcerers would come here many years ago to practice meditation and other techniques of Yaqui sorcery.
Carlos demonstrated some of these. One exercise was designed to help the person to come to feel the lines of the world According to Yaqui sorcery, the world is composed of lines and, with proper exercise, one can come to know these directly. Carlos stood with his feet forming a right angle, his left arm extended outward, and his right arm parallel to the ground and bent inward toward the chest. He turned his left palm toward the back and his right palm to the front. He moved the first two fingers of each hand rapidly as though he were plucking upon a stringed instrument. He closed his hands slowly and with great tension until his fists were tightly clenched. As he formed the fists, he turned his arms and body around gracefully into a position that resembled a prizefighter in a crouch. Quite suddenly, Carlos released the tension of his body and opened his fists. “Pop,” he said “there they are. The lines of the world!” I tried the exercise. I sensed something I had never known before. What it was, I really don’t know. Perhaps, it was the "lines of the world.”
In the very center of the forest of chapparal, Carlos showed the way to bury yourself. Yaqui sorcerers would come to this place, meticulously build a small shelter of bits and pieces of manzanita and mesquite in which to “bury “themselves. This was a way to produce ”psychological death,” a technique for “stopping the world.” In this fashion, the sorcerer would meditate for several days stopping the incessant flow of the inner dialogue and interrupting the stream of ordinary perceptions that prevent one from “seeing.” The burial act is not a funeral practice. It is a way to practice not-doing the world as we normally do it.
There in the place of power which don Juan envisioned in a dream, Carlos told us how to survive in the woods. He told how he and don Juan trapped rattlesnakes. You need lots of string, Carlos said, to make traps of various kinds. With the rattlesnake the trapping is done with a length of string made into a loop which is slipped over the snake’s head when it comes out of its hole. Carlos says that “dental floss is the best thing to use. Anthropologists don’t need all that junk they take into the field with them. All they need is dental floss, lots of dental floss. You could survive anywhere with dental floss.” Carlos revels in the joys of eating rattlesnake. “Stupendous,” the says. “Truly stupendous. Better than whale, turkey, chicken."
Carlos said that there were other places of power. Each one was different. There is even a place of power where you can go to get rid of the evil spirits that will cling to a sorcerer. He knows of one such place where the Sorcerer squeezes through a narrow exit made by an opening between two sheer cliff walls As the sorcerer squeezes through the opening the evil things are rubbed off and remain behind forever in the place of power. These “evil spirits” are not to be confused with allies, Carlos says. They are other undesirable things that can attach themselves to a warrior.
There in the place of power, Carlos seems truly happy: His energy seems inexhaustible Carlos charges down one hill and up another. He moves easily through the thick chapparal like a swift coyote. He bounces about like a slightly plump little gnome. There is no question about it: in the wild hills above Malibu, Carlos is totally at home. He jokes about don Juan, don Genaro, and others he has known. His speech, like don Juan’s is peppered with slang. He says “by gum” and “by jingo” and even “by golly”. Carlos advises me to be serious but don’t take yourself too seriously. As we prepared to leave the place of power, Carlos warned us: "Leave everything that you found here behind. Do not take branches, flowers, rocks, nothing. It is very dangerous!”
We then proceeded to drive down through Malibu Canyon in search of a “water canyon" where Carlos would find angelica for us. Angelica is a favorite plant of the Yaqui sorcerers. Burning of its dried stalk produces a smoke which is thought to produce great “clarity". We searched for angelica in a creek bed directly beneath a sign that warned: “No trespassing Los Angeles County Water District. $500.00 fine and/or imprisonment for violators.” Carlos ignored the sign. We found several strands of green angelica but none that had dried naturally. “It is no good," said Carlos. “It must be dry before you pick it." I smelled the green angelica. It smelled very familiar I took a bite of it. “Carlos,” I said, "this is wild celery.” Carlos said: "Of course, wild celery. It’s good isn’t it? Angelica is amazing.” I took it to a famous botanist at UCLA for analysis. He told me there is nothing in it. Nothing. Perfectly innocuous stuff. You could eat 10 pounds of it and nothing would happen. But it is important to the sorcerer. He insists that its smoke will produce great clarity. The sorcerers use it often for scenting the room, much like people here use incense or sprays to freshen the air in their houses. Sometimes they make tea from it. Carlos says that angelica tea is mild and delicious.
Ruth and I left Carlos and the others in the “water canyon” and headed home for Laguna Beach via Los Angeles International Airport, where we had to meet a friend’s plane. Driving through Venice, California, Ruth got violently ill. I took a wrong turn and ended up getting a traffic citation for “driving on the Venice Boardwalk." Ruth and I had a terrible spat. Our friend’s plane was two hours late. A nasty rainstorm broke over Los Angeles as we were leaving the airport and on the freeway my windshield wiper motor burned out. I couldn’t believe the incredible run of bad luck we were having. Forced to leave the freeway, we crept down U.S. 1 at midnight in driving rain. I stuck my left arm out of the window and, using it like a windshield wiper, managed to keep a small spot clear enough to see, it took us hours to get home. On the way. Ruth turned pale and said, “Oh my God!” I thought she was getting terribly sick again but it wasn’t that at all. Rummaging in her jacket pocket for a cigarette, she found a twig from the place of power.
“How could you do that?” I shouted. “Carlos told you not to take anything from there. Look what has happened.”
“But I didn’t take it," she said. "It must have jumped into my pocket.”
“I don’t care how it got there. Throw the goddamned thing out of the window. Right now!” I was so unnerved I nearly drove night across the road into a truck coming toward us. Our friends whom we had picked up at the airport earlier watched us from the back seat as though we were crazy. “What’s with a twig?” they wanted to know. Ruth threw it out. “Forget it,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “It was nothing.” But I knew I was lying. It certainly wasn’t nothing. The rain stopped as suddenly as it came and my windshield wipers started working again.
We drove back to Laguna Beach easily then. My thoughts as we raced through the night were on Carlos, don Juan, and the Yaqui way of knowledge. I remembered one last story Carlos told us. Don Juan had told him that he did not know himself at all. To prove his point, don Juan told Carlos to think of himself in terms that were the exact opposite of those in which he normally thought of himself. Carlos did so for several days. He was amazed to find that the opposite description fitted just as well. He rushed back to don Juan with the news that he wasn’t at all what he had thought he was. Don Juan said: "That is good, Carlos. But when you really come to see you will know that you are not the opposite either. In the end, you are a dead man just like everybody else.”
As I drove, I thought back to the strange but beautiful day with Carlos in the hills above Malibu and the incredible events that had followed. The dangers of groping through the dark night in a rain-storm had forced me to think of my own death. I realized that the Yaqui way of knowledge is all about death. More precisely, it is all about living courageously with the fact of death, the ultimate terror in being a man. Fragments of a poem of which Carlos is particularly fond kept edging into my consciousness. The poem, by Juan Ramon Jimenez, was a favorite of don Juan’s as well.
“And I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing; and my garden will stay, with its green tree, with its water well.“”
source - /t/forgotten-inaccessible-article-john-wallaces-multiple-talks-and-an-excursion-to-a-power-spot-with-carlos-and-attendance-at-castanedas-early-university-seminars-penthouse-magazine-sfw-december-1972/1891