"Stalkers who practice controlled folly believe that, in matters of personality, the entire human race falls into three categories," he said, and smiled the way he always did when he was setting me up.
"That's absurd," I protested. "Human behavior is too complex to be categorized so simply."
"Stalkers say that we are not so complex as we think we are," he said, "and that we all belong to one of three categories."
I laughed out of nervousness. Ordinarily I would have taken such a statement as a joke, but this time, because my mind was extremely clear and my thoughts were poignant, I felt he was indeed serious.
"Are you serious?" I asked, as politely as I could.
"Completely serious," he replied, and began to laugh.
His laughter relaxed me a little. And he continued explaining the stalkers' system of classification.
He said that people in the first class are the perfect secretaries, assistants, companions. They have a very fluid personality, but their fluidity is not nourishing. They are, however, serviceable, concerned, totally domestic, resourceful within limits, humorous, well-mannered, sweet, delicate.
In other words, they are the nicest people one could find, but they have one huge flaw: they can't function alone. They are always in need of someone to direct them. With direction, no matter how strained or antagonistic that direction might be, they are stupendous. By themselves, they perish.
People in the second class are not nice at all. They are petty, vindictive, envious, jealous, selfcentered.
They talk exclusively about themselves and usually demand that people conform to their standards. They always take the initiative even though they are not comfortable with it. They are thoroughly ill at ease in every situation and never relax. They are insecure and are never pleased; the more insecure they become the nastier they are. Their fatal flaw is that they would kill to be leaders.
In the third category are people who are neither nice nor nasty. They serve no one, nor do they impose themselves on anyone. Rather they are indifferent. They have an exalted idea about themselves derived solely from daydreams and wishful thinking. If they are extraordinary at anything, it is at waiting for things to happen. They are waiting to be discovered and conquered and have a marvelous facility for creating the illusion that they have great things in abeyance, which they always promise to deliver but never do because, in fact, they do not have such resources.
Don Juan said that he himself definitely belonged to the second class. He then asked me to classify myself and I became rattled. Don Juan was practically on the ground, bent over with laughter.
He urged me again to classify myself, and reluctantly I suggested I might be a combination of the three.
"Don't give me that combination nonsense," he said, still laughing. "We are simple beings, each of us is one of the three types. And as far as I am concerned, you belong to the second class. Stalkers call them farts."
I began to protest that his scheme of classification was demeaning. But I stopped myself just as I was about to go into a long tirade. Instead I commented that if it were true that there are only three types of personalities, all of us are trapped in one of those three categories for life with no hope of change or redemption.
He agreed that that was exactly the case. Except that one avenue for redemption remained. Sorcerers had long ago learned that only our personal self-reflection fell into one of the categories.
"The trouble with us is that we take ourselves seriously," he said. "Whichever category our self image falls into only matters because of our self-importance. If we weren't self-important, it wouldn't matter at all which category we fell into.
....
Don Juan said that in the course of their nighttime journeys in the wilderness, the nagual Julian had lectured him extensively on the nature of self-importance and the movement of the assemblage point. For the nagual Julian, self-importance was a monster that had three thousand heads. And one could face up to it and destroy it in any of three ways. The first way was to sever
each head one at a time; the second was to reach that mysterious state of being called the place of no pity, which destroyed self-importance by slowly starving it; and the third was to pay for the instantaneous annihilation of the three-thousand-headed monster with one's symbolic death.
