The Second Ring of Power (40 page)

Is it possible, I thought to myself, that I am unconsciously selecting
what I recall? Or is it la
Gorda who is creating all this? If it
was true that I had selected my recall at first and then released
what
I had censored, then it also had to be true that I must have perceived much
more of don
Juan's and don Genaro's actions, and yet I could only
recall a selective part of my total perception of those events.

"It's hard to believe," I said to la Gorda, "that I can
remember now something I didn't
remember at all a while ago."

"The Nagual said that everyone can
see
, and yet we choose
not to remember what we
see
," she
said. "Now
I understand how right he was. All of us can
see
; some, more than
others."

I told la Gorda that some part of me knew that I had found then a
transcendental key. A
missing piece had been handed down to
me by all of them. But it was difficult to discern what it
was.

She announced that she had just "seen" that I had practiced a
good deal of "dreaming," and
that I had
developed my attention, and yet I was fooled by my own appearance of not
knowing
anything.

"I've been trying to tell you about attention," she proceeded,
"but you know as much as we do
about it."

I assured her that my knowledge was intrinsically different from
theirs; theirs was infinitely
more spectacular than mine. Anything
they might say to me in relation to their practices,
therefore, was
a bonus to me.

"The Nagual told us to show you that with our attention we can hold
the images of a dream in
the same way we hold the images of the
world," la Gorda said. "The art of the dreamer is the art
of
attention."

Thoughts came down on me like a landslide. I had to stand up and walk
around the kitchen. I
sat down again. We remained quiet for a
long time. I knew what she had meant when she said
that the art of dreamers was the art
of attention. I knew then that don Juan had told me and
showed me everything he could. I had not been able, however, to realize
the premises of his
knowledge in my
body while he was around. He had said that my reason was the demon that kept
me chained, and that I had to vanquish it if I
wanted to achieve the realization of his teachings.
The issue, therefore, had been how to vanquish my
reason. It had never occurred to me to press him for a definition of what he
meant by reason. I presumed all along that he meant the capacity
for comprehending, inferring or thinking, in an
orderly, rational way. From what la Gorda had
said, I knew that to him reason meant attention.

Don Juan said that the core of our being was the act of perceiving, and
that the magic of our being was the act of awareness. For him perception and
awareness were a single, functional,
inextricable unit, a unit which
had two domains. The first one was the "attention of the tonal";

that is to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place
their awareness on the ordinary
world of everyday life. Don Juan also
called this form of attention our "first ring of power," and
described
it as our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart order to our
perception of our
daily world.

The second domain was the "attention of the nagual"; that is
to say, the capacity of sorcerers to
place their awareness on the
nonordinary world. He called this domain of attention the "second
ring
of power," or the altogether portentous ability that all of us have, but
only sorcerers use, to impart order to the nonordinary world.

La Gorda and the little sisters, in demonstrating to me that the art of
dreamers was to hold the
images of their dreams with their
attention, had brought in the pragmatic aspect of don Juan's
scheme.
They were the practitioners who had gone beyond the theoretical aspect of his
teachings.
In order to give me a demonstration of that art, they had
to make use of their "second ring of
power," or
the "attention of the nagual." In order for me to witness their art,
I had to do the same.
In fact it was evident that I had
placed my attention on both domains. Perhaps all of us are
continually
perceiving in both fashions but choose to isolate one for recollection and
discard the other or perhaps we file it away, as I myself had done. Under
certain conditions of stress or
acquiescence, the censored memory
surfaces and we can then have two distinct memories of one
event.

What don Juan had struggled to vanquish, or rather suppress in me, was
not my reason as the
capacity for rational thought, but my
"attention of the tonal," or my awareness of the world of
common
sense. His motive for wanting me to do so was explained by la Gorda when she
said that the daily world exists because we know how to hold its images;
consequently, if one drops the
attention needed to maintain those
images, the world collapses.

"The Nagual told us that practice is what counts," la Gorda
said suddenly. "Once you get your
attention on
the images of your dream, your attention is hooked for good. In the end you can
be
like Genaro, who could hold the images of any
dream."

"We each have five other dreams," Lidia said. "But we
showed you the first one because that was the dream the Nagual gave us."

"Can all of you go into
dreaming
any time you want?" I
asked.

"No," la Gorda replied. "
Dreaming
takes too much
power. None of us has that much power.
The reason the
little sisters had to roll on the floor so many times was that in rolling the
earth was
giving them energy. Maybe you could also remember
seeing
them as luminous beings getting
energy from the light of the
earth. The Nagual said that the best way of getting energy is, of
course,
to let the sun inside the eyes, especially the left eye."

I told her that I knew nothing about it, and she described a procedure
that don Juan had taught
them. As she spoke I remembered that
don Juan had also taught the same procedure to me. It
consisted in
moving my head slowly from side to side as I caught the sunlight with my half-
closed
left eye. He said that one could not only use the sun but could use any kind of
light that
could shine on the eyes.

La Gorda said that the Nagual had recommended that they tie their shawls
below their waists in order to protect their hipbones when they rolled.

I commented that don Juan had never mentioned rolling to me. She said
that only women
could roll because they had wombs and energy came
directly into their wombs; by rolling around
they
distributed that energy over the rest of their bodies. In order for a man to be
energized he had
to be on his back, with his knees bent so that the
soles of his feet touched each other. His arms had to be extended laterally,
with his forearms raised vertically, and the fingers clawed in an
upright
position.

"We have been
dreaming
those dreams for years," Lidia
said. "Those dreams are our best,
because our attention is complete. In the other dreams that we have, our
attention is still shaky."

La Gorda said that holding the images of dreams was a Toltec art. After
years of consuming
practice each one of them was able to perform one
act in any dream. Lidia could walk on
anything, Rosa could dangle from
anything, Josefina could hide behind anything and she herself
could
fly. But they were only beginners, apprentices of the art. They had complete
attention for
only one activity. She added that Genaro was the master
of "dreaming" and could turn the tables
around and
have attention for as many activities as we have in our daily life, and that
for him the
two domains of attention had the same value.

I felt compelled to ask them my usual question: I had to know their
procedures, how they held
the images of their dreams.

"You know that as well as we do," la Gorda said. "The
only thing I can say is that after going to the same dream over and over, we
began to feel the lines of the world. They helped us to do what you saw us
doing."

Don Juan had said that our "first ring of power" is engaged
very early in our lives and that we
live under the impression that
that is all there is to us. Our "second ring of power," the
"attention
of the nagual," remains hidden for the
immense majority of us, and only at the moment of our
death is it
revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to
every one
of us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway
is through "dreaming." "Dreaming" was in
essence
the transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition.
Dreamers, by
engaging their "attention of the nagual" and
focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary
dreams, change
those dreams into "dreaming."

Don Juan said that there were no procedures to arrive at the attention
of the nagual. He only
gave me pointers. Finding my hands in
my dreams was the first pointer; then the exercise of
paying
attention was elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such
as buildings,
streets and so on. From there the jump was to
"dreaming" about specific places at specific times
of
the day. The final stage was drawing the "attention of the nagual" to
focus on the total self.
Don Juan said that that final stage
was usually ushered in by a dream that many of us have had at one time or
another, in which one is looking at oneself sleeping in bed. By the time a
sorcerer has
had such a dream, his attention has been developed to
such a degree that instead of waking himself up, as most of us would do in a
similar situation, he turns on his heels and engages
himself in
activity, as if he were acting in the world of everyday life. From that moment
on there
is a breakage, a division of sorts in the otherwise
unified personality. The result of engaging the
"attention
of the nagual" and developing it to the height and sophistication of our
daily attention
of the world was, in don Juan's scheme, the other
self, an identical being as oneself, but made in
"dreaming."

Don Juan had told me that there are no definite standard steps for
reaching that double, as
there are no definite steps for us to
reach our daily awareness. We simply do it by practicing. He
contended
that in the act of engaging our "attention of the nagual," we would
find the steps. He
urged me to practice "dreaming" without letting my fears make
it into an encumbering
production.

He had done the same with la Gorda and the little sisters, but obviously
something in them had
made them more receptive to the idea of
another level of attention.

"Genaro was in his body of dreaming most of the time," la
Gorda said. "He liked it better. That's why he could do the weirdest
things and scare you half to death. Genaro could go in and
out
of the crack between the worlds like you and I can go in and out a door."

Don Juan had also talked to me at great length about the crack between
the worlds. I had
always believed that he was talking in a
metaphorical sense about a subtle division between the
world that the
average man perceives and the world that sorcerers perceive.

La Gorda and the little sisters had shown me that the crack between the
worlds was more than
a metaphor. It was rather the capacity
to change levels of attention. One part of me understood la
Gorda
perfectly, while another part of me was more frightened than ever.

"You have been asking where the Nagual and Genaro went," la
Gorda said. "Soledad was very
blunt and told you that they went to the other world;
Lidia told you they left this area; the
Genaros
were stupid and scared you. The truth is that the Nagual and Genaro went
through that
crack."

For some reason, undefinable to me, her statements plunged me into
profound chaos. I had felt
all along that they had left for good.
I knew that they had not left in an ordinary sense, but I had kept that feeling
in the realm of a metaphor. Although I had even voiced it to close friends, I
think
I never really believed it myself. In the depths of me I
had always been a rational man. But la
Gorda and the
little sisters had turned my obscure metaphors into real possibilities. La
Gorda had
actually transported us half a mile with the energy of
her "dreaming."