first encounter with Tao

© Philip Hyde

After the acceptance of Don Juan to teach him about peyote, called by him Mescalito, Castaneda for the first time takes the dried buttons and by them one of the most powerful hallucinogens - mescaline; the resulting experience in the Tart terminology starts with the transition from the ordinary baseline consciousness state b-SoC into a deep altered state d-ASC to be back, with a difficult transition, to the b-SoC:

Monday, 7 August 1961
I arrived at don Juan’s house in Arizona about seven o’clock on Friday night. Five other Indians were sitting with him on the porch of his house. I greeted him and sat waiting for them to say something. After a formal silence one of the men got up, walked over to me, and said, “Buenas noches.” I stood up and answered, “Buenas noches.” Then all the other men got up and came to me and we all mumbled “Buenas noches” and shook hands either by barely touching one another’s finger-tips or by holding the hand for an  instant and then dropping it quite abruptly.
We all sat down again. They seemed to be rather shy—at a loss for words, although they all spoke Spanish.
It must have been about half past seven when suddenly they all got up and walked towards the back of the house. Nobody had said a word for a long time. Don Juan signalled me to follow and we all got inside an old pickup truck parked there. I sat in the back with don Juan and two younger men. There were no cushions or benches and the metal floor was painfully hard, especially when we left the highway and got onto a dirt road.
Don Juan whispered that we were going to the house of one of his friends who had seven mescalitos for me.
I asked him, “Don’t you have any of them yourself, don Juan?”
“I do, but I couldn’t offer them to you. You see, someone else has to do this.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Perhaps you are not agreeable to «him» and «he» won’t like you, and then you will never be able to know «him» with affection, as one should; and our friendship will be broken.”
“Why wouldn’t he like me? I have never done anything to him.”
“You don’t have to do anything to be liked or disliked. He either takes you, or throws you away.”
“But, if he doesn’t take me, isn’t there anything I can do to make him like me?”
The other two men seemed to have overheard my question and laughed.
“No! I can’t think of anything one can do,” don Juan said.
He turned half away from me and I could not talk to him any more.
We must have driven for at least an hour before we stopped in front of a small house. It was quite dark, and after the driver had turned off the headlights I could make out only the vague contour of the building.
A young woman, a Mexican, judging by her speech inflection, was yelling at a dog to make him stop barking. We got out of the truck and walked into the house. The men mumbled “Buenas noches” as they went by her. She answered back and went on yelling at the dog.
The room was large and was stacked up with a multitude of objects. A dim light from a very small electric bulb rendered the scene quite gloomy. There were quite a few chairs with broken legs and sagging seats leaning against the walls. Three of the men sat down on a couch, which was the largest single piece of furniture in the room. It was very old and had sagged down all the way to the floor; in the dim light it seemed to be red and dirty.
The rest of us sat in chairs. We sat in silence for a long time.
One of the men suddenly got up and went into another room.
He was perhaps in his fifties, tall, and husky. He came back a moment later with a coffee jar. He opened the lid and handed the jar to me; inside there were seven odd-looking items.
They varied in size and consistency. Some of them were almost round, others were elongated.
They felt to the touch like the pulp of walnuts, or the surface of cork. Their brownish colour made them look like hard, dry nutshells. I handled them, rubbing their surfaces for quite some time.
“This is to be chewed [esto se masca],” don Juan said in a whisper.
I had not realized that he had sat next to me until he spoke.
I looked at the other men, but no one was looking at me; they were talking among
themselves in very low voices. This was a moment of acute indecision and fear. I felt almost unable to control myself.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said to him. “I’ll go outside and take a walk.”
He handed me the coffee jar and I put the peyote buttons in it.
I was leaving the room when the man who had given me the jar stood up, came to me, and said he had a toilet bowl in the other room.
The toilet was almost against the door. Next to it, nearly touching the toilet, was a large bed which occupied more than half of the room. The woman was sleeping there. I stood motionless at the door for a while, then I came back to the room where the other men were.
The man who owned the house spoke to me in English: “Don Juan says you’re from South America. Is there any mescal there?”
I told him that I had never even heard of it.
They seemed to be interested in South America and we talked about the Indians for a while.
Then one of the men asked me why I wanted to eat peyote. I told him that I wanted to know what it was like. They all laughed shyly.
Don Juan urged me softly,” Chew it, chew it [Masca, masca].”
My hands were wet and my stomach contracted. The jar with the peyote buttons was on the floor by the chair. I bent over, took one at random, and put it in my mouth. It had a stale taste. I bit it in two and started to chew one of the pieces. I felt a strong, pungent bitterness; in a moment my whole mouth was numb. The bitterness increased as I kept on chewing, forcing an incredible flow of saliva. My gums and the inside of my mouth felt as if I had eaten salty, dry meat or fish, which seems to force one to chew more. After a while I chewed the other piece and my mouth was so numb I couldn’t feel the bitterness any more. The peyote button was a bunch of shreds, like the fibrous part of an orange or like sugarcane, and I didn’t know whether to swallow it or spit it out. At that moment the owner of the house got up and invited everybody to go out to the porch.
We went out and sat in the darkness. It was quite comfortable outside, and the host brought out a bottle of tequila.
The men were seated in a row with their backs to the wall. I was at the extreme right of the line. Don Juan, who was next to me, placed the jar with the peyote buttons between my legs.
Then he handed me the bottle, which was passed down the line, and told me to take some of the tequila to wash away the bitterness.
I spat out the shreds of the first button and took a sip. He told me not to swallow it, but to just rinse out my mouth with it to stop the saliva. It did not help much with the saliva, but it certainly helped to wash away some of the bitterness.
Don Juan gave me a piece of dried apricot, or perhaps it was a dried fig—I couldn’t see it in the dark, nor could I taste it—and told me to chew it thoroughly and slowly, without rushing. I had difficulty swallowing it; it felt as if it would not go down.
After a short pause the bottle went around again. Don Juan handed me a piece of crispy dried meat. I told him I did not feel like eating.
“This is not eating,” he said firmly.
The pattern was repeated six times. I remember having chewed six peyote buttons when the conversation became very lively; although I could not distinguish what language was spoken, the topic of the conversation, in which everybody participated, was very interesting, and I attempted to listen carefully so that I could take part. But when I tried to speak I realized I couldn’t; the words shifted aimlessly about in my mind.
I sat with my back propped against the wall and listened to what the men were saying.
They were talking in Italian, and repeated over and over one phrase about the stupidity of sharks.
I thought it was a logical, coherent topic. I had told don Juan earlier that the Colorado River in Arizona was called by the early Spaniards “el rio de los tizones [the river of charred wood]”; and someone mis-spelled or misread “tizones”, and the river was called “el rio de los tiburones [the river of the sharks]”. I was sure they were discussing that story, yet it never occurred to me to think that none of them could speak Italian.
I had a very strong desire to throw up, but I don’t recall the actual act. I asked if somebody would get me some water. I was experiencing an unbearable thirst.
Don Juan brought me a large saucepan. He placed it on the ground next to the wall. He also brought a little cup or can. He dipped it into the pan and handed it to me, and said I could not drink but should just freshen my mouth with it.
The water looked strangely shiny, glossy, like a thick varnish.
I wanted to ask don Juan about it and laboriously I tried to voice my thoughts in English, but then I realized he did not speak English. I experienced a very confusing moment, and became aware of the fact that although there was a clear thought in my mind, I could not speak. I wanted to comment on the strange quality of the water, but what followed next was not speech; it was the feeling of my unvoiced thoughts coming out of my mouth in a sort of liquid form. It was an effortless sensation of vomiting without the contractions of the diaphragm. It was a pleasant flow of liquid words. I drank. And the feeling that I was vomiting disappeared. By that time all noises had vanished and I found I had difficulty focusing my eyes. I looked for don Juan and as I turned my head I noticed that my field of vision had diminished to a circular area in front of my eyes.
This feeling was neither frightening nor discomforting, but, quite to the contrary, it was a novelty; I could literally sweep the ground by focusing on one spot and then moving my head slowly in any direction. When I had first come out to the porch I had noticed it was all dark except for the distant glare of the city lights. Yet within the circular area of my vision everything was clear. I forgot about my concern with don Juan and the other men, and gave myself entirely to exploring the ground with my pinpoint vision.
I saw the juncture of the porch floor and the wall. I turned my head slowly to the right, following the wall, and saw don Juan sitting against it. I shifted my head to the left in order to focus on the water. I found the bottom of the pan; I raised my head slightly and saw a medium-size black dog approaching. I saw him coming towards the water. The dog began to drink. I raised my hand to push him away from my water; I focused my pinpoint vision on the dog to carry on the movement, and suddenly I saw him become transparent. The water was a shiny, viscous liquid.
I saw it going down the dog’s throat into his body. I saw it flowing evenly through his entire length and then shooting out through each one of the hairs. I saw the iridescent fluid travelling along the length of each individual hair and then projecting out of the hairs to form a long, white, silky mane.
At that moment I had the sensation of intense convulsions, and in a matter of instants a tunnel formed around me, very low and narrow, hard and strangely cold. It felt to the touch like a wall of solid tinfoil. I found I was sitting on the tunnel floor.
I tried to stand up, but hit my head on the metal roof, and the tunnel compressed itself until it was suffocating me. I remember having to crawl toward a son of round point where the tunnel ended; when I finally arrived, if I did, I had forgotten all about the dog, don Juan, and myself. I was exhausted. My clothes were soaked in a cold, sticky liquid. I rolled back and forth trying to find a position in which to rest, a position where my heart would not pound so hard. In one of those shifts I saw the dog again.
Every memory came back to me at once, and suddenly all was clear in my mind. I turned around to look for don Juan, but I could not distinguish anything or anyone. All I was capable of seeing was the dog becoming iridescent; an intense light radiated from his body. I saw again the water flowing through him, kindling him like a bonfire. I got to the water, sank my face in the pan, and drank with him. My hands were in front of me on the ground and, as I drank, I saw the fluid running through my veins setting up hues of red and yellow and green. I drank more and more. I drank until I was all afire; I was all aglow. I drank until the fluid went out of my body through each pore and projected out like fibres of silk, and I too acquired a long, lustrous, iridescent mane. I looked at the dog and his mane was like mine. A supreme happiness filled my whole body, and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place. And there we played. We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine. We took turns manipulating each other in the fashion of a puppet show. I could make him move his legs by twisting my toes, and every time he nodded his head I felt an irresistible impulse to jump. But his most impish act was to make me scratch my head with my foot while I sat; he did it by flapping his ears from side to side. This action was to me utterly, unbearably funny. Such a touch of grace and irony; such mastery, I thought. The euphoria that possessed me was indescribable. I laughed until it was almost impossible to breathe.
I had the clear sensation of not being able to open my eyes; I was looking through a tank of water. It was a long and very painful state filled with the anxiety of not being able to wake up and yet being awake. Then slowly the world became clear and in focus. My field of vision became again very round and ample, and with it came an ordinary conscious act, which was to turn around and look for that marvellous being. At this point I encountered the most difficult transition. The passage from my normal state had taken place almost without my realizing it: I was aware; my thoughts and feelings were a corollary of that awareness; and the passing was smooth and clear. But this second change, the awakening to serious, sober consciousness, was genuinely shocking. I had forgotten I was a man! The sadness of such an irreconcilable situation was so intense that I wept.