Silent knowledge was an entire facet of the lives and activities of the shamans or sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times. According to don Juan Matus, the sorcerer-teacher who introduced me in the cognitive world of those sorcerers, silent knowledge was the most coveted end result they sought through every one of their actions and thoughts.
Don Juan defined silent knowledge as a state of human awareness in which everything pertinent to man is instantly revealed, not to the mind or the intellect, but to the entire being. He explained that there was a band of energy in the universe which sorcerers call the band of man, and that such a band was present in man. He assured me that for sorcerer-seers, who see energy directly as it flows in the universe, and who can see a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields in the form of a luminous sphere, the band of man is a fringe of compact luminosity that cuts across the luminous sphere at an angle from its left side to its right. The total luminous sphere is the width and the height of the extended arm, and in that luminous sphere, the band of man is perhaps around a foot wide. Silent knowledge, don Juan explained, is the interplay of energy within that band, an interplay which is instantly revealed to the shaman who has attained inner silence. Don Juan said that the average man had inklings of this energetic interplay. Man intuits it, and gets busy deducing its workings, figuring out its permutations. A sorcerer, on the other hand, gets a blast of the totality of this interplay at any time that the rendition of this interplay is solicited.
Don Juan assured me that the prelude to silent knowledge was a state of human perception which sorcerers called inner silence, a state void of the silent verbalizations that sorcerers call the internal dialogue, or even void of thoughts. No matter how hard don Juan Matus tried to make his definitions and explanations of silent knowledge available to me, they remained obscure, mysterious, inscrutable. In his effort to clarify his point further, don Juan gave me a series of concrete examples of silent knowledge. The one I have liked the most, because of its scope and applicability, is something that he called readers of infinity. Readers of infinity is something that sounds like a metaphor, but it is rather, a phenomenological description that don Juan made of a shamanistic perceptual condition.
In their continuous search for solutions and answers to their probes, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico found out that from this condition of inner silence, the awareness of man can easily leap to the direct perception of energy against the background of any given horizon. They used the sky as a horizon, as well as the mountains, or in a more reduced space, the walls of their dwelling. They were capable of seeing energy reflected on those horizons as if they were at the movies. They concisely described this phenomenon as the visualization of energy in the aspect of a hue to be precise, a spot of redness on the horizon, a pomegranate red. They called it the blotch of pomegranate.
Those sorcerers claimed that that blotch of pomegranate erupted, at a given moment, into images which they saw as if they were veritably watching a movie. This perceptual attainment converted them into what they called viewers of infinity. Don Juan believed that for me, it was more appropriate to consider that instead of viewing infinity, I should read it, since I was given to reading with the same, if not greater passion than the shamans of ancient Mexico were given to viewing. Don Juan made it very clear to me that to be a reader of infinity doesn’t mean that one reads energy as if one were reading a newspaper, but that words become clearly formulated as one reads them, as if one word leads into another, forming whole concepts that are revealed and then vanish. The art of sorcerers is to have the prowess to gather and preserve them before they enter into oblivion by being replaced with the new words, the new concepts of a never-ending stream of graphic consciousness.
Don Juan further explained that the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who established his lineage, were capable of reaching silent knowledge after entering its matrix: inner silence. He said that inner silence was an accomplishment of such tremendous importance for them that they set it up as the essential condition of shamanism.
But in the world of sorcerers, don Juan said, procedures and rituals are mere designs to attract and focus attention. For them, navigation is a practicality, and navigation means to move from world to world, without losing sobriety, without losing strength: and, to accomplish this feat of navigation, there cannot be procedures, or steps to be followed, but one single abstract act that defines it all: the act, of reinforcing our link with the force that permeates the universe, a force which sorcerers call intent. Since we are alive and conscious, we are already intimately related to intent. What we need, sorcerers say, is to make that link the realm of our conscious acts, and that act of becoming conscious of our link with intent is another way of defining silent knowledge. In order to intend, one must be the possessor of physical and mental prowess and a clear spirit.
Don Juan told me that those sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered and developed a great number of procedures, which they called magical passes, for the attainment of physical and mental well-being. Their superb state of physical and mental balance was the most obvious feature about them. Don Juan explained that, given as they were to ritualistic behavior, they promptly hid the magical passes in the midst of rituals and veiled the act of teaching or practicing them with great secrecy.
Don Juan taught me and his other three disciples, Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau and Carol Tiggs, a given number of magical passes, but along with that wealth of knowledge, he also left us with the certainty that we were the last members of his lineage. In unanimous agreement, don Juan’s three female disciples and I accepted what don Juan called our fate. First of all, we asked ourselves the crucial question of what to do with the magical passes. We decided to use the magical passes, and teach them to whomever wants to learn them. All four of us then, endeavored to come up with an amalgamation of the four different lines of passes. We have called this new configuration of movements Tensegrity.
Don Juan said that there were five issues in the lives of those sorcerers around which rotated the pursuit of silent knowledge. These five topics were: 1 – The magical passes; 2 – The energetic center in the human body called the center for decisions; 3 – The Recapitulation; 4 – Dreaming; 5 – Inner silence.
(Carlos Castaneda, Silent Knowledge)
