In the case of my work with don Juan I have limited my efforts solely to viewing him as a sorcerer and to acquiring membership in his knowledge.
For the purpose of presenting my argument I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.
For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.
He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.
For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious proposition.
Fortunately, in the case of my apprenticeship, don Juan was not concerned at all with whether or not I could take his proposition seriously, and he proceeded to elucidate his points, in spite of my opposition, my dis-belief, and my inability to understand what he was saying. Thus, as a teacher of sorcery, don Juan endeavored to describe the world to me from the very first time we talked. My difficulty in grasping his concepts and methods stemmed from the fact that the units of his description were alien and incompatible with those of my own.
His contention was that he was teaching me how to "see" as opposed to merely "looking," and that "stopping the world" was the first step to "seeing."
For years I had treated the idea of "stopping the world" as a cryptic metaphor that really did not mean anything. It was only during an informal conversation that took place towards the end of my apprenticeship that I came to fully realize its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of don Juan's knowledge.
Don Juan and I had been talking about different things in a relaxed and unstructured manner. I told him about a friend of mine and his dilemma with his nine-year-old son. The child, who had been living with the mother for the past four years, was then living with my friend, and the problem was what to do with him? According to my friend, the child was a misfit in school; he lacked concentration and was not interested in anything. He was given to tantrums, disruptive behavior, and to running away from home.
"Your friend certainly does have a problem," don Juan said, laughing.
I wanted to keep on telling him all the "terrible" things the child had done, but he interrupted me.
"There is no need to say any more about that poor little boy," he said.
"There is no need for you or for me to regard his actions in our thoughts one way or another."
His manner was abrupt and his tone was firm, but then he smiled.
"What can my friend do?" I asked.
"The worst thing he could do is to force the child to agree with him," don Juan said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that that child shouldn't be spanked or scared by his father when he doesn't behave the way he wants him to."
"How can he teach him anything if he isn't firm with him?"
"Your friend should let someone else spank the child."
"He can't let anyone else touch his little boy!" I said, surprised at his suggestion.
Don Juan seemed to enjoy my reaction and giggled.
"Your friend is not a warrior," he said. "If he were, he would know that the worst thing one can do is to confront human beings bluntly."
"What does a warrior do, don Juan?"
"A warrior proceeds strategically."
"I still don't understand what you mean."
"I mean that if your friend were a warrior he would help his child to stop the world."
"How can my friend do that?"
"He would need personal power. He would need to be a sorcerer."
"But he isn't."
"In that case he must use ordinary means to help his son to change his idea of the world. It is not stopping the world, but it will work just the same."
I asked him to explain his statements.
"If I were your friend," don Juan said, "I would start by hiring someone to spank the little guy. I would go to skid row and hire the worst-looking man I could find."
"To scare a little boy?"
"Not just to scare a little boy, you fool. That little fellow must be stopped, and being beaten by his father won't do it.
"If one wants to stop our fellow men one must always be outside the circle that presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure."
The idea was preposterous, but somehow it was appealing to me.
Don Juan was resting his chin on his left palm. His left arm was propped against his chest on a wooden box that served as a low table. His eyes were closed but his eyeballs moved. I felt he was looking at me through his eyelids. The thought scared me.
"Tell me more about what my friend should do with his little boy," I said.
"Tell him to go to skid row and very carefully select an ugly-looking derelict," he went on. "Tell him to get a young one. One who still has some strength left in him."
Don Juan then delineated a strange strategy. I was to instruct my friend to have the man follow him or wait for him at a place where he would go with his son. The man, in response to a prearranged cue to be given after any objectionable behavior on the part of the child, was supposed to leap from a hiding place, pick the child up, and spank the living daylights out of him.
"After the man scares him, your friend must help the little boy regain his confidence, in any way he can. If he follows this procedure three or four times I assure you that that child will feel differently toward everything. He will change his idea of the world."
"What if the fright injures him?"
"Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.
"When that boy is more contained you must tell your friend to do one last thing for him. He must find some way to get to a dead child, perhaps in a hospital, or at the office of a doctor. He must take his son there and show the dead child to him. He must let him touch the corpse once with his left hand, on any place except the corpse's belly. After the boy does that he will be renewed. The world will never be the same for him."
I realized then that throughout the years of our association don Juan had been employing with me, although on a different scale, the same tactics he was suggesting my friend should use with his son. I asked him about it. He said that he had been trying all along to teach me how to "stop the world."
"You haven't yet," he said, smiling. "Nothing seems to work, because you are very stubborn. If you were less stubborn, however, by now you would probably have stopped the world with any of the techniques I have taught you."
"What techniques, don Juan?" .
"Everything I have told you to do was a technique for stopping the world."
A few months after that conversation don Juan accomplished what he had set out to do, to teach me to "stop the world."
That monumental event in my life compelled me to reexamine in detail my work of ten years. It became evident to me that my original assumption about the role of psychotropic plants was erroneous. They were not the essential feature of the sorcerer's description of the world, but were only an aid to cement, so to speak, parts of the description which I had been incapable of perceiving otherwise.
