The fifth topic, which is the culmination of the other four, and which was most avidly sought by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, is inner silence. Inner silence was defined by don Juan as a natural state of human perception in which thoughts are blocked off and all of man’s faculties function from a level of awareness which doesn’t require the functioning of our daily cognitive system. Don Juan associated inner silence with darkness because human perception, deprived of its habitual companion the internal dialogue, falls into something that resembles a dark pit[cite: 435]. The body functions as usual, but awareness becomes sharper.
Inner silence, in the understanding of the sorcerers of don Juan’s lineage, is the matrix for a gigantic step of evolution ; the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called this gigantic step of evolution silent knowledge. Silent knowledge is a state of human awareness where knowing is automatic and instantaneous. Knowledge in this state is not the product of cerebral cogitations or logical inductions and deductions. For silent knowledge, everything is imminently now.
Don Juan taught that inner silence must be gained by a consistent pressure of discipline. He said that it has to be accrued, or that it has to be stored, bit by bit, second by second. In other words, one has to force oneself to be silent, if it is only for a few seconds. Don Juan claimed that if one is persistent, persistence overcomes habit, and thus, one arrives at a threshold of accrued seconds or minutes, a threshold which varies from person to person. If, for instance, the threshold of inner silence is for any given individual, ten minutes, once this mark is reached, inner silence happens by itself, by its own accord, so to speak.
Following don Juan’s suggestion, I persisted in forcing myself to remain silent, and one day, while walking at UCLA, I reached my mysterious threshold. In one instant, I experienced something don Juan had described at length to me: he had called it stopping the world. In one instant, the world stopped being what it was, and for the first time in my life, I became conscious that I was seeing energy as it flows in the universe. I was resting on energy, I was myself energy, and so was everything around me. I became conscious that although I was seeing for the first time in my life, I had been seeing energy as it flows in the universe all my life, but I had not been conscious of it. The novelty was the query that arose with such fury that it made me surface back into the world of everyday life. “What has been keeping me from realizing that I have seen energy as it flows in the universe all my life?” I asked myself.
Don Juan explained it to me, making a distinction between general awareness and being deliberately conscious of something. He said that our human condition is to have this deep awareness, but that all the instances of this deep awareness are not at the level of being deliberately conscious of them. He said that inner silence had bridged the gap, as was its function, and had allowed me to become conscious of things I had only been aware of in a general sense.
(Carlos Castaneda, Silent Knowledge)
