The Second Ring of Power (43 page)

"Then he put stacks of dry leaves in front of me. He told me to
scramble them with my left
hand and feel them as I gazed at them.
A dreamer moves the leaves in spirals, gazes at them and then dreams of the
designs that the leaves make. The Nagual said that dreamers can consider
themselves
as having mastered leaf gazing when they dream the designs of the leaves first
and
then find those same designs the next day in their pile
of dry leaves.

"The Nagual said that gazing at leaves fortifies the second
attention. If you gaze at a pile of
leaves for hours, as he used to
make me do, your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the
attention
of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and
the leaves become something else. The Nagual called the moment when the second
attention hooks
onto something
stopping the world
. And that
is correct, the world stops. For this reason there
should always
be someone around when you gaze. We never know about the quirks of our
second
attention. Since we have never used it, we have to become familiar with it
before we
could venture into gazing alone.

"The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts.
The Nagual said that he
preferred to teach us how to do that
with a pile of leaves because we could get all the leaves we
needed
any time we wanted to gaze. But anything else would do the same job.

"Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And since the only
way of stopping the world is
by trying, the Nagual made all of us
gaze at dry leaves for years and years. I think it's the best
way
to reach our second attention.

"He combined gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in
dreaming
.
It took me about a
year to find my hands, and four years to stop the
world. The Nagual said that once you have trapped your second attention with
dry leaves, you do gazing and
dreaming
to enlarge it. And
that's
all there is to gazing."

"You make it sound so simple, Gorda."

"Everything the Toltecs do is very simple. The Nagual said that
all we needed to do in order to
trap our second attention was to try
and try. All of us stopped the world by gazing at dry leaves. You and Eligio
were different. You yourself did it with power plants, but I don't know what
path the Nagual followed with Eligio. He never wanted to tell me. He told me
about you because we
have the same task."

I mentioned that I had written in my notes that I had had the first
complete awareness of
having stopped the world only a few
days before. She laughed.

"You stopped the world before any of us," she said.
"What do you think you did when you
took all those
power plants? You've never done it by gazing like we did, that's all."

"Was the pile of dry leaves the only thing the Nagual made you gaze
at?"

"Once dreamers know how to stop the world, they can gaze at other
things; and finally when
the dreamers lose their form
altogether, they can gaze at anything. I do that. I can go into
anything.
He made us follow a certain order in gazing, though.

"First we gazed at small plants. The Nagual warned us that small
plants are very dangerous.
Their power is concentrated; they have
a very intense light and they feel when
dreamers
are
gazing
at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers
have to
choose one kind of plant to gaze at.

"Next we gazed at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of
tree to gaze at. In this respect
you and I are the same; both of us are
eucalyptus gazers."

By the look on my face she must have guessed my next question.

"The Nagual said that with his smoke you could very easily get your
second attention to
work," she went on. "You focused your
attention lots of times on the Nagual's predilection, the crows. He said that
once, your second attention focused so perfectly on a crow that it flew away,
like
a crow flies, to the only eucalyptus tree that was around."

For years I had dwelled upon that experience. I could not regard it in
any other way except as
an inconceivably complex hypnotic
state, brought about by the psychotropic mushrooms
contained in
don Juan's smoking mixture in conjunction with his expertise as a manipulator
of
behavior. He suggested a perceptual catharsis in me,
that of turning into a crow and perceiving
the world as a
crow. The result was that I perceived the world in a manner that could not have
possibly been part of my inventory of past experiences. La Gorda's
explanation somehow had
simplified everything.

She said that the Nagual next made them gaze at moving, living
creatures. He told them that
small insects were by far the best
subject. Their mobility made them innocuous to the gazer, the
opposite
of plants which drew their light directly from the earth.

The next step was to gaze at rocks. She said that rocks were very old
and powerful and had a
specific light which was rather greenish in contrast with
the white light of plants and the
yellowish
light of mobile, living beings. Rocks did not open up easily to gazers, but it
was
worthwhile for gazers to persist
because rocks had special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that could
aid sorcerers in their "dreaming."

"What are the things that rocks reveal to you?" I asked.

"When I gaze into the very core of a rock," she said, "I
always catch a whiff of a special scent
proper to that
rock. When I roam around in my
dreaming
, I know where I am because I'm
guided by those scents."

She said that the time of the day was an important factor in tree and
rock gazing. In the early
morning trees and rocks were stiff and
their light was faint. Around noon was when they were at
their
best, and gazing at that time was done for borrowing their light and power. In
the late
afternoon and early evening trees and rocks were quiet
and sad, especially trees. La Gorda said
that at that
hour trees gave the feeling that they were gazing back at the gazer.

A second series in the order of gazing was to gaze at cyclic phenomena:
rain and fog. She said
that gazers can focus their second
attention on the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on the
background
and use the rain as a magnifying glass of sorts to reveal hidden features.
Places of
power or places to be avoided are found by gazing through
rain. Places of power are yellowish
and places to be avoided are
intensely green.

La Gorda said that fog was unquestionably the most mysterious thing on
earth for a gazer and
that it could be used in the same two ways that rain was
used. But it did not easily yield to
women,
and even after she had lost her human form, it remained unattainable to her.
She said that the Nagual once made her "see" a green mist at the head
of a fog bank and told her that was the
second attention of a fog gazer who lived in the mountains where she
and the Nagual were, and
that he was
moving with the fog. She added that fog was used to uncover the ghosts of
things that were no longer there and that the true feat of fog gazers was to
let their second attention go into
whatever
their gazing was revealing to them.

I told her that once while I was with don Juan I had seen a bridge
formed out of a fog bank. I
was aghast at the clarity and precise
detail of that bridge. To me it was more than real. The scene
was
so intense and vivid that I had been incapable of forgetting it. Don Juan's
comments had been
that I would have to cross that bridge someday.

"I know about it," she said. "The Nagual told me that
someday when you have mastery over
your second attention you'll
cross that bridge with that attention, the same way you flew like a
crow
with that attention. He said that if you become a sorcerer, a bridge will form
for you out of
the fog and you will cross it and disappear from
this world forever. Just like he himself has done."

"Did he disappear like that, over a bridge?"

"Not over a bridge. But you witnessed how he and Genaro stepped
into the crack between the
worlds in front of your very eyes.
Nestor said that only Genaro waved his hand to say good-bye
the
last time you saw them; the Nagual did not wave because he was opening the
crack. The
Nagual told me that when the second attention has to be
called upon to assemble itself, all that is
needed is the
motion of opening that door. That's the secret of the Toltec dreamers once they
are
formless."

I wanted to ask her about don Juan and don Genaro stepping through that
crack. She made me
stop with a light touch of her hand on my mouth.

She said that another series was distance and cloud gazing. In both, the
effort of gazers was to
let their second attention go to the
place they were gazing at. Thus, they covered great distances
or
rode on clouds. In the case of cloud gazing, the Nagual never permitted them to
gaze at thunderheads. He told them that they had to be formless before they
could attempt that feat, and that they could not only ride on a thunderhead but
on a thunderbolt itself.

La Gorda laughed and asked me to guess who would be daring and crazy
enough actually to
try gazing at thunderheads. I could think of no
one else but Josefina. La Gorda said that Josefina
tried gazing at
thunderheads every time she could when the Nagual was away, until one day a
thunderbolt
nearly killed her.

"Genaro was a thunderbolt sorcerer," she went on. "His
first two apprentices, Benigno and Nestor, were singled out for him by his
friend the thunder. He said that he was looking for plants in a very remote
area where the Indians are very private and don't like visitors of any kind.
They
had given Genaro permission to be on their land since he
spoke their language. Genaro was
picking some plants when it began to
rain. There were some houses around but the people were
unfriendly
and he didn't want to bother them; he was about to crawl into a hole when he
saw a
young man coming down the road riding a bicycle heavily
laden with goods. It was Benigno, the
man from the town, who dealt
with those Indians. His bicycle got stuck in the mud and right there a
thunderbolt struck him. Genaro thought that he had been killed. People in the
houses had seen
what happened and came out. Benigno was more scared
than hurt, but his bicycle and all his merchandise were ruined. Genaro stayed
with him for a week and cured him.

"Almost the same thing happened to Nestor. He used to buy medicinal
plants from Genaro,
and one day he followed him into the mountains to
see where he picked his plants, so he wouldn't
have to pay
for them anymore. Genaro went very far into the mountains on purpose; he
intended
to make Nestor get lost. It wasn't raining but there
were thunderbolts, and suddenly a thunderbolt
struck the
ground and ran over the dry ground like a snake. It ran right between Nestor's
legs and
hit a rock ten yards away.

"Genaro said that the bolt had charred the inside of Nestor's
legs. His testicles were swollen
and he got very ill. Genaro had to cure
him for a week right in those mountains.

"By the time Benigno and Nestor were cured, they were also hooked.
Men have to be hooked.
Women don't need that. Women go freely
into anything. That's their power and at the same time
their drawback.
Men have to be led and women have to be contained."

She giggled and said that no doubt she had a lot of maleness in her,
for she needed to be led,
and that I must have a lot of
femaleness in me, for I needed to be contained.

The last series was fire, smoke and shadow gazing. She said that for a
gazer, fire is not bright
but black, and so is smoke. Shadows, on the other hand, are
brilliant and have color and
movement in
them.

There were two more things that were kept separate, star and water
gazing. Stargazing was
done by sorcerers who have lost their
human form. She said that she had fared very well at
stargazing, but
could not handle gazing at water, especially running water, which was used by
formless sorcerers to gather their second attention and transport it to
anyplace they needed to go.

"All of us are terrified of water," she went on. "A
river gathers the second attention and takes
it away and
there is no way of stopping. The Nagual told me about your feats of water
gazing.
But he also told me that one time you nearly
disintegrated in the water of a shallow river and that you can't even take a
bath now."