n childbirth when the spirit of MAN UNCREATED rose in thunder and flames over the eviscerated world; so must they have prayed in the catacombs, those skeletons to whom it is written that MAN himself appeared. He joined his hands and his eyes kindled. His face became transfixed and closed. But the more he withdrew into himself, the more I had the impression that a strange and legible emotion radiated physically from him. He moved two or three times. And each time his eyes, which had become almost fixed, returned to a point next to him, as if he wanted to be aware of something that was to be feared. But I realized that what he might be afraid of was falling short of the respect he owed to God, through some sort of negligence. And I observed two very important things: the first-was tha

t the Tarahumara Indian does not attach the same value to his body that we Europeans do, and that he has an entirely different notion of it. "It isn't I at all," he seemed to say, "who am this body," and when he turned to stare at something next to him it was his body itself that he seemed to examine and observe. Where I am myself and what I am, it is Ciguri who tells it to me and dictates it to me, and you who lie and disobey. What I feel in reality you are never willing to feel, and you give me contrary sensations. You want nothing of what I want. And what you p

ropose to me most of the time is Evil. You have been nothing but a transitory ordeal and a burden. Someday I shall command you to leave when Ciguri himself will be free, but," he said suddenly, weeping, 'you must not leave altogether. It was Ciguri, after all, who made you and many times you have provided me with a refu

• ge from the storm, for Ciguri would die if he did
• not have me." The second thing I observed in the middle of this prayer —for this series of movements in front of himself and as if beside him
• self which I had just witnessed, and which took much less time to perform than I have taken to report it, constituted the Indian's impromptu pra
• yer at the mere sound of the name Ciguri. The se
• cond thing that struck me is that if the Indian

is the enemy of his body, he seems also to have sacrificed his consciousness to God, and it seems that the habit of Peyote guides him in this work. The emotions which radiated from him, which passed across his face one after the other, and which could be read, were manifestly not his own; he did not attribute them to himself, he no longer identified with what for us IS a personal emotion, or rathe

How Much Does it Cost?r he did not do it in our way, as the result of a choice and of an instant flashing incubation as we do. Among all the ideas that pass through our heads there are those we accept and those we do not accept. On the day when our self and our consciousness are formed there is established within this incessant movement of incubation a distinctive rhythm and a natural choice whereby only our own ideas remain in the field of consciousness, and the rest automatically vanish. It may take us time to carve out of our emotions and isolate from them our own face, but the way we think on the most important points is like the totem of an i

ndisputable grammar that measures its terms word for word. And our self, when we question it, always responds in the same way; like someone who knows that it is he who answers and not another. It is not like this with the Indian. A European would never allow himself to think that

something he has felt and perceived in his body, an

emotion which has shaken him, a strange idea which he has just had and which has inspired him with its beauty, was not his own, and that someone else has felt and experienced all this in his own body—or else he would believe himself m

ad and people would probably say that he had become a lunatic. The Tarahumara, on the contrary, systemat