Free The Power of Silence by Carlos Castaneda

center of true gestures for the spirit. They
hit pretty close to it, though."
    He picked
up one of my poetry books from a chair next to him, a collection by Juan Ramon
Jimenez. He opened it to where he had placed a marker, handed it to me and
signaled me to read.
    Is it I who walks tonight in
my room
    or is it
the beggar who was prowling in my garden at nightfall?
    I look
around and find that everything is the same and it is not the same
    Was the
window open?
    Had I not
already fallen asleep?
    Was not the
garden pale green? . . .
    The sly was
clear and blue . . .
    And there
are clouds and it is windy
    and the
garden is dark and gloomy.
    I think
that my hair was black . . .
    I was
dressed in grey . . .
    And my hair
is grey
    and I am
wearing black . . .
    Is this my
gait?
    Does this
voice, which now resounds in me,
    have the
rhythms of the voice I used to have?
    Am I myself
or am I the beggar
    who was
prowling in my garden at nightfall? I look around . . .
    There are
clouds and it is windy . . .
    The garden
is dark and gloomy . . .
    I come and
go . . .
    Is it not
true that I had already fallen asleep? My hair is grey . . .
    And
everything is the same and it is not the same . . .
    I reread
the poem to myself and I caught the poet's mood of impotence and bewilderment.
I asked don Juan if he felt the same.
    "I
think the poet senses the pressure of aging and the anxiety that that
realization produces," don Juan said. "But that is only one part of
it. The other part, which interests me, is that the poet, although he never
moves his assemblage point, intuits that something extraordinary is at stake.
He intuits with great certainty that there is some unnamed factor, awesome
because of its simplicity, that is determining our fate."

 
5. - The Trickery Of The Spirit: Dusting
The Link With The Spirit
    The sun had
not yet risen from behind the eastern peaks, but the day was already hot. As we
reached the first steep slope, a couple of miles along the road from the
outskirts of town, don Juan stopped walking and moved to the side of the paved
highway. He sat down by some huge boulders that had been dynamited from the
face of the mountain when they cut the road and signaled me to join him. We
usually stopped there to talk or rest on our way to the nearby mountains. Don
Juan announced that this trip was going to be long and that we might be in the
mountains for days.
    "We
are going to talk now about the third abstract core," don Juan said.
"It is called the trickery of the spirit, or the trickery of the abstract,
or stalking oneself, or dusting the link."
    I was
surprised at the variety of names, but said nothing. I waited for him to
continue his explanation.
    "And
again, as with the first and second core," he went on, "it could be a
story in itself. The story says that after knocking on the door of that man
we've been talking about, and having no success with him, the spirit used the
only means available: trickery. After all, the spirit had resolved previous
impasses with trickery. It was obvious that if it wanted to make an impact on
this man it had to cajole him. So the spirit began to instruct the man on the
mysteries of sorcery. And the sorcery apprenticeship became what it is: a route
of artifice and subterfuge.
    "The
story says that the spirit cajoled the man by making him shift back and forth
between
levels of awareness to show him how to save energy needed to strengthen his
connecting link."
    Don Juan
told me that if we apply his story to a modern netting we had the case of the
nagual, the living conduit of the spirit, repeating the structure of this
abstract core and resorting to artifice and subterfuge in order to teach.
    Suddenly he
stood and started to walk toward the mountain range. I followed him and we
started our climb, side by side.
    In the very
late afternoon we reached the top of the high mountains. Even at that altitude
it was still very warm. All day we had followed a nearly invisible trail.
Finally we reached a small