08-01-2011, 12:00 AM
"The classifications of the shamans of ancient Mexico," don Juan
replied, "were more profound than the conclusions of modern scientists,
because they stemmed from perceiving energy directly as it flows in the
universe. When the human body is perceived as energy, it is utterly
patent that it is composed not of two parts, but of two different types
of energy: two different currents of energy, two opposing and at the
same time complementary forces that coexist side by side, mirroring, in
this fashion, the dual structure of everything in the universe at
large."
The shamans of ancient Mexico accorded each-one of these two different
kinds of energy the stature of a total body, and spoke exclusively in
terms of the left body and the right body. Their emphasis was on the
left body, because they considered it to be the most effective, in terms
of the nature of its energy configuration, for the ultimate goals of
shamanism. The shamans of ancient Mexico, who depicted the two bodies as
streams of energy, depicted the left stream as being more turbulent and
aggressive, moving in undulating ripples and projecting out waves of
energy. When illustrating what he was talking about, don Juan asked me
to visualize a scene in which the left body was like half of the sun,
and that all the solar flares happened on that half. The waves of energy
projected out of the left body were like those solar flares - always
perpendicular to the round surface from which they originated.
He depicted the stream of energy of the right body as not being
turbulent at all on the surface. It moved like water inside a tank which
was being slightly tilted back and forth. There were no ripples in it,
but a continuous rocking motion. At a deeper level, however, it swirled
in rotational circles in the form of spirals. Don Juan asked me to
envision a very wide, peaceful-looking tropical river, where the water
on the surface seemed barely to move, but which had shattering riptides
below the surface. In the world of everyday life, these two currents are
amalgamated into a single unit: the human body as we know it.
To the eye of the seer, however, the energy of the total body is
circular. This meant to the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage that the
right body was the predominant
force...
The
predominance of the right body is an
energetic predominance, which was encountered by the shamans of those
ancient times. They never tried to explain why this predominance
happened in the first place, nor did they try to further investigate the
philosophical implications of it. For them, it was a fact, but a very
special fact. It was a fact that could be changed."
"Why did they want to change it, don Juan?" I asked.
"Because the predominant circular motion of the right
body's energy
,is too friggin' boring!" he exclaimed. "That circular
motion certainly
takes care of any event of the daily world, but it does it circularly,
if you know what I mean."
"I don't know what you mean, don Juan," I said.
"Every situation in life is met in this circular fashion," he replied,
making a small circle with his hand. "On and on and on and on and on.
It's a circular movement that seems to draw the energy inward always,
and turns it around and around in a centripetal motion. Under these
conditions, there's no expansion. Nothing can be new. There is nothing
that cannot be inwardly accounted for. What a drag!"
"In what way can this situation be changed, don Juan?" I asked.
"It's too late to be really changed," he replied. "The damage is
already done. The spiral quality is here to remain. But it doesn't have
to be ceaseless. Yes, we walk the way we do, we can't change that, but
we would also like to run, or to walk backward, or to climb a ladder;
just to walk and walk and walk and walk is very effective, but
meaningless. The contribution of the left body would make
those centers
of vitality more pliable. If they could undulate instead of moving in
spirals, if only for an instant, different energy would get into them,
with staggering results."
I understood what he was talking about, at a level beyond thought,
because there was really no way that I could have understood it
linearly.
"The sensation that human beings have of being utterly bored with
themselves," he continued, "is due to this predominance of the right
body. The only thing left for human beings to do, in a universal sense,
is to find ways of ridding themselves of boredom. What they end up doing
is finding ways of killing time: the only commodity no one has enough
of. But what's worse is the reaction to this unbalanced distribution of
energy. The violent reactions of people are due to this unbalanced
distribution. It seems that from time to time, helplessness builds
furious currents of energy within the human body, which explode in
violent behavior. Violence seems to be, for human beings, another way of
killing time."
"But why is it, don Juan, that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico never
wanted to know why this situation happened?" I asked, bewildered. I
found what I was feeling about this inward motion to be fascinating.
"They never tried to find out," he said, "because the instant they
formulated the question, they knew the answer."
"So they knew why?" I asked.
"No, they didn't know why, but they knew how it happened. But that's
another story."
He left me hanging there, but throughout the course of my association
with him, he explained this seeming contradiction.
"Awareness is the only avenue that human beings have for
evolution...
Don Juan described our evolutionary possibility as a journey that our
awareness takes across something the shamans of ancient Mexico called
the dark sea of awareness: something which they considered to be an
actual feature of the universe, an incommensurable element that
permeates the universe, like clouds of matter, or light.
Don Juan was convinced that the predominance of the right body in this
unbalanced merging of the right and left bodies marks the interruption
of our journey of awareness. What seems for us to be the natural
dominance of one side over the other was, for the sorcerers of his
lineage, an aberration, which they strove to correct.
Those shamans believed that in order to establish a harmonious division
between the left and the right bodies, practitioners needed to enhance
their awareness. Any enhancement of human awareness, however, had to be
buttressed by the most exigent discipline. Otherwise, this enhancement,
painfully accomplished, would turn into an obsession, resulting in
anything from psychological aberration to energetic injury.
Don Juan Matus called the collection of magical passes which deal
exclusively with the separation between the left body and the right body
The Heat Group: the most crucial element in the training of the shamans
of ancient Mexico. This was a nickname given to this
collection of
magical passes because it makes the energy of the right body a little
more turbulent. Don Juan Matus used to joke about this phenomenon,
saying that the movements for the left body put an enormous pressure on
the right body, which has been accustomed from birth to ruling without
opposition. The moment it is faced with opposition, it gets hot with
anger. Don Juan urged all his disciples to practice the Heat Group
assiduously, in order to use its aggressiveness to reinforce the weak
left body.
"Magical
Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient
Mexico"
Surely anyone truly
interested in Nagualism would not ignore this,
the 'most
crucial element in the training of the shamans of ancient
Mexico'...
replied, "were more profound than the conclusions of modern scientists,
because they stemmed from perceiving energy directly as it flows in the
universe. When the human body is perceived as energy, it is utterly
patent that it is composed not of two parts, but of two different types
of energy: two different currents of energy, two opposing and at the
same time complementary forces that coexist side by side, mirroring, in
this fashion, the dual structure of everything in the universe at
large."
The shamans of ancient Mexico accorded each-one of these two different
kinds of energy the stature of a total body, and spoke exclusively in
terms of the left body and the right body. Their emphasis was on the
left body, because they considered it to be the most effective, in terms
of the nature of its energy configuration, for the ultimate goals of
shamanism. The shamans of ancient Mexico, who depicted the two bodies as
streams of energy, depicted the left stream as being more turbulent and
aggressive, moving in undulating ripples and projecting out waves of
energy. When illustrating what he was talking about, don Juan asked me
to visualize a scene in which the left body was like half of the sun,
and that all the solar flares happened on that half. The waves of energy
projected out of the left body were like those solar flares - always
perpendicular to the round surface from which they originated.
He depicted the stream of energy of the right body as not being
turbulent at all on the surface. It moved like water inside a tank which
was being slightly tilted back and forth. There were no ripples in it,
but a continuous rocking motion. At a deeper level, however, it swirled
in rotational circles in the form of spirals. Don Juan asked me to
envision a very wide, peaceful-looking tropical river, where the water
on the surface seemed barely to move, but which had shattering riptides
below the surface. In the world of everyday life, these two currents are
amalgamated into a single unit: the human body as we know it.
To the eye of the seer, however, the energy of the total body is
circular. This meant to the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage that the
right body was the predominant
force...
The
predominance of the right body is an
energetic predominance, which was encountered by the shamans of those
ancient times. They never tried to explain why this predominance
happened in the first place, nor did they try to further investigate the
philosophical implications of it. For them, it was a fact, but a very
special fact. It was a fact that could be changed."
"Why did they want to change it, don Juan?" I asked.
"Because the predominant circular motion of the right
body's energy
,is too friggin' boring!" he exclaimed. "That circular
motion certainly
takes care of any event of the daily world, but it does it circularly,
if you know what I mean."
"I don't know what you mean, don Juan," I said.
"Every situation in life is met in this circular fashion," he replied,
making a small circle with his hand. "On and on and on and on and on.
It's a circular movement that seems to draw the energy inward always,
and turns it around and around in a centripetal motion. Under these
conditions, there's no expansion. Nothing can be new. There is nothing
that cannot be inwardly accounted for. What a drag!"
"In what way can this situation be changed, don Juan?" I asked.
"It's too late to be really changed," he replied. "The damage is
already done. The spiral quality is here to remain. But it doesn't have
to be ceaseless. Yes, we walk the way we do, we can't change that, but
we would also like to run, or to walk backward, or to climb a ladder;
just to walk and walk and walk and walk is very effective, but
meaningless. The contribution of the left body would make
those centers
of vitality more pliable. If they could undulate instead of moving in
spirals, if only for an instant, different energy would get into them,
with staggering results."
I understood what he was talking about, at a level beyond thought,
because there was really no way that I could have understood it
linearly.
"The sensation that human beings have of being utterly bored with
themselves," he continued, "is due to this predominance of the right
body. The only thing left for human beings to do, in a universal sense,
is to find ways of ridding themselves of boredom. What they end up doing
is finding ways of killing time: the only commodity no one has enough
of. But what's worse is the reaction to this unbalanced distribution of
energy. The violent reactions of people are due to this unbalanced
distribution. It seems that from time to time, helplessness builds
furious currents of energy within the human body, which explode in
violent behavior. Violence seems to be, for human beings, another way of
killing time."
"But why is it, don Juan, that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico never
wanted to know why this situation happened?" I asked, bewildered. I
found what I was feeling about this inward motion to be fascinating.
"They never tried to find out," he said, "because the instant they
formulated the question, they knew the answer."
"So they knew why?" I asked.
"No, they didn't know why, but they knew how it happened. But that's
another story."
He left me hanging there, but throughout the course of my association
with him, he explained this seeming contradiction.
"Awareness is the only avenue that human beings have for
evolution...
Don Juan described our evolutionary possibility as a journey that our
awareness takes across something the shamans of ancient Mexico called
the dark sea of awareness: something which they considered to be an
actual feature of the universe, an incommensurable element that
permeates the universe, like clouds of matter, or light.
Don Juan was convinced that the predominance of the right body in this
unbalanced merging of the right and left bodies marks the interruption
of our journey of awareness. What seems for us to be the natural
dominance of one side over the other was, for the sorcerers of his
lineage, an aberration, which they strove to correct.
Those shamans believed that in order to establish a harmonious division
between the left and the right bodies, practitioners needed to enhance
their awareness. Any enhancement of human awareness, however, had to be
buttressed by the most exigent discipline. Otherwise, this enhancement,
painfully accomplished, would turn into an obsession, resulting in
anything from psychological aberration to energetic injury.
Don Juan Matus called the collection of magical passes which deal
exclusively with the separation between the left body and the right body
The Heat Group: the most crucial element in the training of the shamans
of ancient Mexico. This was a nickname given to this
collection of
magical passes because it makes the energy of the right body a little
more turbulent. Don Juan Matus used to joke about this phenomenon,
saying that the movements for the left body put an enormous pressure on
the right body, which has been accustomed from birth to ruling without
opposition. The moment it is faced with opposition, it gets hot with
anger. Don Juan urged all his disciples to practice the Heat Group
assiduously, in order to use its aggressiveness to reinforce the weak
left body.
"Magical
Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient
Mexico"
Surely anyone truly
interested in Nagualism would not ignore this,
the 'most
crucial element in the training of the shamans of ancient
Mexico'...