Mayfield Mall

This event occurred a few days before Christmas of 1968 when I was 21 years old.  I was engaged to my first wife Katie.  At the time and we were going to spend a few days with her parents in Palo Alto.  It had been a hectic year at college so we hadn’t yet finished our Christmas shopping. The two of us went to a nearby shopping mall (the Mayfield Mall) to see what we could find.  The mall was busy, but not packed or in a “Christmas rush” mode, it was kind of fun to just relax and watch people coming and going. The mall was all decorated in the spirit of the season, with Christmas music playing softly in the background.  Everyone seemed in a good mood that day.    Since Katie was the one who was most interested in shopping, we decided that I would hang out in the open part of the mall, watching folks, while she did her shopping. 

I picked a spot near the main entrance that was out of the traffic, but close enough to it to watch the comings and goings of folks.  I was in a kind of covered courtyard that connected the entrance from the northwest to the shops on either side of a wide hallway going off in an easterly direction.  There was a little roll-around flower cart next to my spot, and a bench about 20 feet away, facing me but facing away from most of the foot traffic. 

I was leaning up against a railing along the wall when I noticed the two men on the bench.  They were Hispanic-looking men, sitting and talking to each other.  One was an older gentleman wearing an old, slightly floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat and neat, clean, “farmer” cloths.  He was dressed like what I would expect an older, rural, Mexican gentleman to wear when he went shopping in town.  The other man was younger, slightly chubby, and wearing slacks and a white shirt.  He was dressed in informal business wear.

At first I didn’t pay much attention them because they were just a couple of guys sitting and chatting, probably waiting for their women just like I was.   However, I then noticed that they were watching me very intently, and apparently talking about me!  This caught my attention, especially when I realized that I could easily hear what they were saying – in clear English with no apparent accent.  The old man gestured toward me and told the younger one that I was a physicist, and had worked at NASA.  (I was majoring in physics at the time and had spent a summer a couple of years ago working at NASA at Moffett Field).  He then went on to describe my summer job at NASA and added in other specifics about me that should have been impossible to know.  They were both watching me in a most unusual way, catching me in a “spell” of some sort.  I found myself connected to them, oddly disconnected from the rest of the environment and people in the mall.  It was like floating in suspended animation. 

After a few seconds (minutes?) of this, I got really embarrassed feeling because I was somehow being stripped naked by these guys.  In my embarrassment I stepped behind the shopping cart to hide from them.  This action broke my spell and I was immediately overwhelmed with curiosity.  I turned back, determined to go up to them and ask them who they were and how they knew these personal things about me.  I had the very clear understanding that the two men were Carlos Castaneda and his teacher Don Juan.  It couldn’t have been more than two or three seconds before making this decision and turning back.  I spun around to confront them, but of course they were gone!  I looked around the mall, but even though the mall floor was 60 or 70 feet wide at this location, and there was only a handful of people on the floor at that moment, I could see clearly that they were not in the halls.  I wondered if maybe they had somehow gotten up and left through the entrance, which would have been the only possible way for them to have gotten out of sight.    I ran to the entrance and checked the hall and parking lot, but there were not there either.  My only explanation is that they vanished into thin air; they were just gone (or maybe hadn’t actually been there).

At that moment I realized that I had failed an important test that don Juan talked to Carlos about in his early books.  He kept talking about “cracks, or slivers, of opportunity” that open into the other side of reality. He said that we have to stay awake to be able to jump into them at the moment that they open.  He had somehow opened such a crack of opportunity for me, but instead of reacting immediately to that opportunity, I become confused and embarrassed.  I missed the moment, and once I missed it – it had closed and was gone.   It became clear to me that one of the main things that a warrior on the path to enlightenment needs to do is become aware and quick enough to spot opportunities and jump – to step through the opening.  It is like being a cat, watching and watching (stalking) the moment, but once the moment is right putting all of your energy into pouncing to catch the opportunity.

About that time Katie showed up looking for me and found me frantically running up and down the mall looking in vain for those men.  I knew that they weren’t there, but I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t overlooked some obvious and mundane explanation for their disappearance.  She just laughed at me as I babbled on about this weird non-encounter encounter.