The Power of Silence Read Online Free Page B

manifestations
of the spirit. Such manifestations were called gestures of the spirit or, more
simply, indications or omens.
    He repeated
a story he had already told me; the story of how he had met his benefactor, the
nagual Julian.
    Don Juan
had been cajoled by two crooked men to take a job on an isolated hacienda. One
of the men, the foreman of the hacienda, simply took possession of don Juan and
in effect made him a slave.
    Desperate
and with no other course of action, don Juan escaped. The violent foreman
chased him and caught him on a country road where he shot don Juan in the chest
and left him for dead.
    Don Juan
was lying unconscious in the road, bleeding to death, when the nagual Julian
came along. Using his healer's knowledge, he stopped the bleeding, took don
Juan, who was still unconscious, home and cured him.
    The
indications the spirit gave the nagual Julian about don Juan were, first, a
small cyclone that lifted a cone of dust on the road a couple of yards from
where he lay. The second omen was the thought which had crossed the nagual Julian's
mind an instant before he had heard the report of the gun a few yards away:
that it was time to have an apprentice nagual. Moments later, the spirit gave
him the third omen, when he ran to take cover and instead collided with the
gunman, putting him to flight, perhaps preventing him from shooting don Juan a
second time. A collision with someone was the type of blunder which no
sorcerer, much less a nagual, should ever make.
    The nagual
Julian immediately evaluated the opportunity. When he saw don Juan he
understood the reason for the spirit's manifestation: here was a double man, a
perfect candidate to be his apprentice nagual.
    This
brought up a nagging rational concern for me. I wanted to know if sorcerers
could interpret an omen erroneously. Don Juan replied that although my question
sounded perfectly legitimate, it was inapplicable, like the majority of my
questions, because I asked them based on my experiences in the world of
everyday life. Thus they were always about tested procedures, steps to be
followed, and rules of meticulousness, but had nothing to do with the premises
of sorcery. He pointed out that the flaw in my reasoning was that I always
failed to include my experiences in the sorcerers' world.
    I argued
that very few of my experiences in the sorcerers' world had continuity, and
therefore I could not make use of those experiences in my present day-to-day
life. Very few times, and only when I was in states of profound heightened
awareness, had I remembered everything. At the level of heightened awareness I
usually reached, the only experience that had continuity between past and
present was that of knowing him.
    He
responded cuttingly that I was perfectly capable of engaging in sorcerers'
reasonings because I had experienced the sorcery premises in my normal state of
awareness. In a more mellow tone he added that heightened awareness did not
reveal everything until the whole edifice of sorcery knowledge was completed.
    Then he
answered my question about whether or not sorcerers could misinterpret omens.
He explained that when a sorcerer interpreted an omen he knew its exact meaning
without having any notion of how he knew it. This was one of the bewildering
effects of the connecting link with intent. Sorcerers had a sense of knowing
things directly. How sure they were depended on the strength and clarity of
their connecting link.
    He said
that the feeling everyone knows as "intuition" is the activation of
our link with intent. And since sorcerers deliberately pursue the understanding
and strengthening of that link, it could be said that they intuit everything
unerringly and accurately. Reading omens is commonplace for sorcerers -
mistakes happen only when personal feelings intervene and cloud the sorcerers'
    connecting
link with intent. Otherwise their direct knowledge is totally accurate and
functional.
    We remained
quiet for a while.
    All of a
sudden he