The Second Ring of Power (42 page)

It was a clear day. The sun was just above the distant range of
mountains. They started moving
their heads in perfect synchronization. I joined them and
had the feeling that I too had
synchronized
my motion with theirs. They kept it up for about a minute and then stopped.

All of them wore hats and used the brims to protect their faces from
the sunlight when they
were not bathing their eyes in it. La
Gorda had given me my old hat to wear.

We sat there for about half an hour. In that time we repeated the
exercise countless times. I
intended to make a mark on my pad for
each time but la Gorda very casually pushed my pad out
of reach.

Lidia suddenly stood up, mumbling something unintelligible. La Gorda
leaned over to me and
whispered that the Genaros were coming
up the road. I strained to look but there was no one in sight. Rosa and
Josefina also stood up and then went with Lidia inside the house.

I told la Gorda that I could not see anyone approaching. She replied
that the Genaros had been
visible at one point on the road and
added that she had dreaded the moment when all of us would
have
to get together, but that she was confident that I could handle the situation.
She advised me
to be extra careful with Josefina and Pablito
because they had no control over themselves. She
said that the
most sensible thing for me to do would be to take the Genaros away after an
hour or
so.

I kept looking at the road. There was no sign of anyone approaching.

"Are you sure they're coming?" I asked.

She said that she had not seen them but that Lidia had. The Genaros had
been visible just for
Lidia because she had been gazing at
the same time she had been bathing her eyes. I was not sure
what
la Gorda had meant and asked her to explain.

"We are gazers," she said. "Just like yourself. We are
all the same. There is no need to deny
that you're a
gazer. The Nagual told us about your great feats of gazing."

"My great feats of gazing! What are you talking about, Gorda?"

She contracted her mouth and appeared to be on the verge of being
irritated by my question;
she seemed to catch herself. She smiled
and gave me a gentle shove.

At that moment she had a sudden flutter in her body. She stared blankly
past me, then she shook her head vigorously. She said that she had just
"seen" that the Genaros were not coming
after all; it
was too early for them. They were going to wait for a while before they made
their
appearance. She smiled as if she were delighted with the
delay.

"It's too early for us to have them here anyway," she said.
"And they feel the same way about
us."

"Where are they now?" I asked.

"They must be sitting beside the road somewhere," she replied.
"Benigno had no doubt gazed
at the house as they were walking and
saw
us sitting here and that's why they have decided to
wait.
That's perfect. That will give us time."

"You scare me, Gorda. Time for what?"

"You have to round up your second attention today, just for us
four."

"How can I do that?"

"I don't know. You are very mysterious to us. The Nagual has done
scores of things to you
with his power plants, but you can't
claim that as knowledge. That is what I've been trying to tell
you.
Only if you have mastery over your second attention can you perform with it;
otherwise
you'll always stay fixed halfway between the two, as you
are now. Everything that has happened
to you since you arrived has
been directed to force that attention to spin. I've been giving you
instructions little by little, just as the Nagual told me to do. Since you took
another path, you don't
know the things that we know, just like
we don't know anything about power plants. Soledad
knows a bit
more, because the Nagual took her to his homeland. Nestor knows about medicinal
plants, but none of us has been taught the way you were. We don't need
your knowledge yet. But
someday when we are ready you are the
one who will know what to do to give us a boost with
power plants. I
am the only one who knows where the Nagual's pipe is hidden, waiting for that
day.

"The Nagual's command is that you have to change your path and go
with us. That means that
you have to do
dreaming
with us
and stalking with the Genaros. You can't afford any longer to be
where
you are, on the awesome side of your second attention. Another jolt of your
nagual coming out of you could kill you. The Nagual told me that human beings
are frail creatures composed of many layers of luminosity. When you see them,
they seem to have fibers, but those fibers are
really layers,
like an onion. Jolts of any kind separate those layers and can even cause human
beings to die."

She stood up and led me back to the kitchen. We sat down facing each
other. Lidia, Rosa and
Josefina were busy in the yard. I could
not see them but I could hear them talking and laughing.

"The Nagual said that we die because our layers become
separated," la Gorda said. "Jolts are
always
separating them but they get together again. Sometimes, though, the jolt is so
great that the layers get loose and can't get back together anymore."

"Have you ever seen the layers, Gorda?"

"Sure. I
saw
a man dying in the street. The Nagual told me
that you also found a man dying,
but you didn't
see
his death.
The Nagual made me
see
the dying man's layers. They were like the
peels
of an onion. When human beings are healthy they are like luminous eggs, but if
they are injured they begin to peel, like an onion.

"The Nagual told me that your second attention was so strong
sometimes that it pushed all the
way out. He and Genaro had to hold your
layers together; otherwise you would've died. That's
why he figured
that you might have enough energy to get your nagual out of you twice. He meant
that you could hold your layers together by yourself twice. You did it
more times than that and now you are finished; you have no more energy to hold
your layers together in case of another
jolt. The
Nagual has entrusted me to take care of everyone; in your case, I have to help
you to
tighten your layers. The Nagual said that death pushes
the layers apart. He explained to me that
the center of
our luminosity, which is the attention of the nagual, is always pushing out,
and that's
what loosens the layers. So it's easy for death to come
in between them and push them completely
apart.
Sorcerers have to do their best to keep their own layers closed. That's why the
Nagual
taught us
dreaming
.
Dreaming
tightens the
layers.

When sorcerers learn dreaming they tie together their two attentions and
there is no more need
for that center to push out."

"Do you mean that sorcerers do not die?"

"That is right. Sorcerers do not die."

"Do you mean that none of us is going to die?"

"I didn't mean us. We are nothing. We are freaks, neither here nor
there. I meant sorcerers.
The Nagual and Genaro are sorcerers.
Their two attentions are so tightly together that perhaps
they'll
never die."

"Did the Nagual say that, Gorda?"

"Yes. He and Genaro both told me that. Not too long before they
left, the Nagual explained to us the power of attention. I never knew about the
tonal and the nagual until then."

La Gorda recounted the way don Juan had instructed them about that
crucial tonal-nagual dichotomy. She said that one day the Nagual had all of
them gather together in order to take them
for a long
hike to a desolate, rocky valley in the mountains. He made a large, heavy
bundle with
all kinds of items; he even put Pablito's radio in it. He
then gave the bundle to Josefina to carry
and put a heavy
table on Pablito's shoulders and they all started hiking. He made all of them
take
turns carrying the bundle and the table as they hiked
nearly forty miles to that high, desolate
place. When
they arrived there, the Nagual made Pablito set the table in the very center of
the
valley. Then he asked Josefina to arrange the contents of
the bundle on the table. When the table
was filled, he
explained to them the difference between the tonal and the nagual, in the same
terms he had explained it
to me in a restaurant in Mexico City, except that in their case his
example was infinitely more graphic.

He told them that the tonal was the order that we are aware of in our
daily world and also the personal order that we carry through life on our
shoulders, like they had carried that table and the
bundle. The
personal tonal of each of us was like the table in that valley, a tiny island
filled with the things we are familiar with. The nagual, on the other hand, was
the inexplicable source that
held that table in place and was like
the vastness of that deserted valley.

He told them that sorcerers were obligated to watch their tonals from a
distance in order to
have a better grasp of what was really
around them. He made them walk to a ridge from where they could view the whole
area. From there the table was hardly visible. He then made them go
back
to the table and had them all loom over it in order to show that an average man
does not
have the grasp that a sorcerer has because an average man
is right on top of his table, holding onto every item on it.

He then made each of them, one at a time, casually look at the objects
on the table, and tested their recall by taking something and hiding it, to see
if they had been attentive. All of them passed
the test with
flying colors. He pointed out to them that their ability to remember so easily
the
items on that table was due to the fact that all of them
had developed their attention of the tonal,
or their
attention over the table.

He next asked them to look casually at everything that was on the
ground underneath the table,
and tested their recall by removing the
rocks, twigs or whatever else was there. None of them
could remember
what they had seen under the table.

The Nagual then swept everything off the top of the table and made each
of them, one at a time, lie across it on their stomachs and carefully examine
the ground underneath. He explained
to them that for a sorcerer the
nagual was the area just underneath the table. Since it was
unthinkable
to tackle the immensity of the nagual, as exemplified by that vast, desolate
place,
sorcerers took as their domain of activity the area
directly below the island of the tonal, as
graphically
shown by what was underneath that table. That area was the domain of what he
called the second attention, or the attention of the nagual, or the attention
under the table. That attention was reached only after warriors had swept the
top of their tables clean. He said that reaching the
second attention made the two
attentions into a single unit, and that unit was the totality of oneself.

La Gorda said that his demonstration was so clear to her that she
understood at once why the Nagual had made her clean her own life, sweep her
island of the tonal, as he had called it. She felt that she had indeed been fortunate
in having followed every suggestion that he had put to her. She
was
still a long way from unifying her two attentions, but her diligence had
resulted in an
impeccable life, which was, as he had assured her,
the only way for her to lose her human form. Losing the human form was the
essential requirement for unifying the two attentions.

"The attention under the table is the key to everything sorcerers
do," she went on. "In order to
reach that
attention the Nagual and Genaro taught us
dreaming
, and you were taught
about power
plants. I don't know what they did to you to teach you
how to trap your second attention with
power plants,
but to teach us how to do
dreaming
, the Nagual taught us gazing. He
never told us what he was really doing to us. He just taught us to gaze. We
never knew that gazing was the way
to trap our second attention.
We thought gazing was just for fun. That was not so. Dreamers have
to
be gazers before they can trap their second attention.

"The first thing the Nagual did was to put a dry leaf on the
ground and make me look at it for
hours. Every day he brought a
leaf and put it in front of me. At first I thought that it was the same
leaf
that he saved from day to day, but then I noticed that leaves are different.
The Nagual said
that when we realized that, we are not looking
anymore, but gazing.