Magical Passes (14 page)

13. Forging the Trunk of the Energy Body

Don Juan said that the trunk of the energy body was forged with three strikes delivered with the palms of the hands. The hands are held at the level of the ears with the palms facing forward, and from that position they strike forward, at the level of the shoulders, as if they were striking the shoulders of a well-developed body. The hands then move back to their original position around the ears, with the palms facing forward, and strike the midtrunk of that imaginary body at the level of the chest. The second strike is not as wide as the first one, and the third strike is much narrower, because it strikes the waistline of a triangular-shaped trunk

14. Slapping the Energy Body

The left and the right hands each come down from above the head. The palm of each hand bears down, creating a current of energy that defines

each arm, forearm, and hand of the energy body. The left hand hits across the body to strike the left hand of the energy body (fig. 153) and then the right hand does the same: it hits across the body to strike the right hand of the energy body. This magical pass defines the arms and forearms, especially the hands, of the energy body.

15. Spreading the Energy Body Laterally The wrists are crossed in the shape of a letter X in front of the body, almost touching it. The wrists are held bent backwards at a ninety-degree angle to the forearm, at the level of the solar plexus. The left wrist is on top of the right one (fig. 154). From there, the hands  spread to the sides in unison, in a slow motion, as if they met with tremendous resistance (fig.  155).

When the arms reach their maximum aperture, they are brought back to the center, with the palms turned at a ninety-degree angle in relation to the forearms, creating in this fashion the sensation of pushing solid

matter from both sides to the center of the body. The left hand crosses on top of the right as the hands get ready for another lateral strike.

While the physical body as a conglomerate of energy fields has super-defined boundaries, the energy body lacks that feature. Spreading energy laterally gives the energy body the defined boundaries that it lacks.

16. Establishing the Core of the Energy Body

The forearms are held in a vertical position at the level of the chest, with the elbows kept in close to the body, at the width of the trunk. The wrists are snapped back gently, and then forward with great force, without moving the forearms (fig. 156).

The human body, as a conglomerate of energy fields, has not only super-defined boundaries, but a core of compact luminosity, which shamans call the band of man, or the energy fields with which man is most familiar. The idea of shamans is that within the luminous sphere, which is also the totality of man's energetic possibilities, there are areas of energy of which human beings are not at all aware. Those are the energy fields located at the maximum distance from the band of man. To establish the core of the energy body is to fortify the energy body in order for it to venture into those areas of unknown energy.

17. Forging the Heels and the Calves of the Energy Body

The left foot is held in front of the body with the heel raised to midcalf. The heel is turned out to a position perpendicular to the other leg. Then the left heel strikes to the right as if a kick with the heel were

being delivered, about six or seven inches away from the shinbone of the right leg (figs. 157, 158).

The same movement is then executed with the other leg.

18. Forging the Knees of the Energy Body

This magical pass has two facets. In the first facet the left knee is bent and raised to the level of the hips, or if possible even higher. The total

weight of the body is placed on the right leg, which stands with the knee slightly bent forward. Three circles are drawn with the left knee, moving it inward toward the groin (fig. 159). The same movement is repeated with the right leg.

In the second facet of this magical pass, the movements are repeated again with each leg, but I Ins time, the knee draws an outward circle (fig. K-0).

19. Forging the Thighs of the Energy Body

Beginning with an exhalation, the body bends slightly at the knees as the hands slide down the thinks. The hands stop on top of the kneecaps, and then they are pulled back up the thighs to the level of the hips with an inhalation, as if they were dragging a solid substance. There is a slight quality of a claw to each hand. The body straightens as this part of the movement is executed (fig. 161). With the opposite breathing pattern, the movement is repeated, inhaling as the knees bend and the hands go down to the tops of the kneecaps, and exhaling as they are pulled back.

20. Stirring Up Personal History by Making It Flexible

This magical pass stretches the hamstring and relaxes it by bringing each leg, one at a time, bent at the knee, to strike the buttocks with a gentle tap of the heel (fig. 162). The left heel strikes the left buttock, and the right heel strikes the right one.

Shamans put an enormous emphasis on tightening the muscles of the backs of the thighs. They believe that the fighter those muscles, the greater the facility of the practitioner to identify and get rid of behavioral patterns that are useless.

21. Stirring Up Personal History with the Heel to the Ground by Tapping It Repeatedly

The right leg is set at a ninety-degree angle with the left. The left foot is placed as far as possible in front of the body as the body almost sits on the right leg. The tension and contraction of the back muscles of the right leg are maximum, as is the stretching of the back muscles of the left leg. The left leg taps the ground repeatedly with the heel (fig. 163). The same movements are then executed with the other leg.

22. Stirring Up Personal History with the Heel to the Ground by Sustaining That Position

The same movements are executed in this magical pass as in the previous one, again with each leg, but instead of tapping with the heel, the body is kept at an even tension by holding the stretch of the leg (fig. 164). The following four magical passes, since they entail deep inhalations and exhalations, have to be done sparingly.

23. The Recapitulation Wings

A deep inhalation is taken as both forearms are raised to the level of the shoulders, with the hands at the level of the ears, palms facing forward. The forearms are held vertically and equidistant from Figure 164 each other. An exhalation follows as the forearms are pulled back as far as possible without slanting them in any direction (fig. 165). Another deep inhalation is taken. Within the duration of one long exhalation, both arms each draw a winglike semicircle, beginning with the left arm moving forward as far as it can be extended and then laterally, drawing a semicircle to the back as far as possible. The arm makes a curve at the end of this extension and returns to the front (fig. 166) to its initial resting position by the side of the body (fig. 167). Then the right arm follows the same pattern within the same exhalation. Once these movements are completed, a deep abdominal breath is taken.

24. The Window of Recapitulation

The first part of this magical pass is exactly like the preceding one; a deep breath is taken with the hands raised to the ear level, with the palms facing forward. The forearms maintain a perfect verticality. This is followed by a long exhalation as the arms are pulled backwards. A deep inhalation is taken as the elbows are extended laterally at the level of the shoulders. The hands are bent at a ninety-degree angle in relation to the forearms, the fingers pointing upward. The hands are slowly pushed toward the center of the body until the forearms cross. The left arm is held closer to the body and the right arm is placed in front of the left. The hands create in this fashion what don Juan called the window of recapitulation: an opening in front of the eyes that looks like a small window, through which, don Juan affirmed, a practitioner could peer into infinity (fig. 168). A deep exhalation follows as the body straightens; the elbows are extended laterally and the hands are straightened out and kept at the same level as the elbows (fig. 169).

25. The Five Deep Breaths

The beginning of this magical pass is exactly like the previous two. At the second inhalation, the arms go down and cross at the level of the knees as the practitioner adopts a semi-squatting position. The hands are placed behind the knees; the right hand grabs the tendons in back of the left knee, and the left hand, with the left forearm on top of the right, grabs the tendons in back of the right knee. The index and middle fingers grab the outer tendons there and the thumb is wrapped around the inner part of the knee. The exhalation ends then, and a deep inhalation is taken, accompanied by pressing the tendon (fig. 170). Five breaths are taken in this fashion.

This magical pass causes the back to be straight and the head to be in alignment with the spine, and is used to take deep breaths that fill the top as well as the lower part of the lungs by pushing the diaphragm downward.

26. Drawing Energy from the Feet

The first part of this magical pass is exactly the same as the beginning of the other three of this series. On

the second inhalation, the forearms go down and wrap around the ankles, going from the inside to the outside as the practitioner adopts a squatting position. The backs of the hands rest on top of the toes, and in this fashion, three deep inhalations and three deep exhalations are made (fig. 171). After the last exhalation, the body straightens as a deep inhalation is taken to finish the magical pass.

The only glow of awareness left in human beings is at the bottom of Their luminous spheres, a fringe that extends in a circle and reaches the level of the toes. With this magical pass, that fringe is tapped with the Kicks of the fingers, and stirred with the breath.

The Third Group: Dreaming

Don Juan Matus defined dreaming as the act of using normal dreams as a bona fide entrance for human awareness into other realms of perceiving; I his definition implied for him that ordinary dreams could be used as a hatch that led perception into other regions of energy different from the energy of the world of everyday life, and yet utterly similar to it at a basic core. The result of such an entrance was, for sorcerers, the perception of veritable worlds where they could live or die, worlds which were astoundingly different from ours, and yet utterly similar.

Pressed for a linear explanation of this contradiction, don Juan Matus reiterated the standard position of sorcerers: that the answers to all those questions were in the practice, not in the intellectual inquiry. He said that in order to talk about such possibilities, we would have to use the syntax of language, whatever language we spoke, and that syntax, by the force of usage, limits the possibilities of expression. The syntax of any language refers only to perceptual possibilities found in the world in which we live.

Don Juan made a significant differentiation, in Spanish, between two verbs: one was to dream, sonar; and the other was ensueno, which is to dream the way sorcerers dream. In English, there is no clear distinction between these two states: the normal dreaming, sueno, and the more complex state that sorcerers call ensueno.

The art of dreaming, according to what don Juan taught, originated in a very casual observation that the shamans of ancient Mexico made when they saw people who were asleep. They noticed that during sleep the assemblage point was displaced in a very natural, easy way from its habitual position, and that it moved anywhere along the periphery of the luminous sphere, or to any place in the interior of it. Correlating their seeing with the reports of the people who had been observed sleeping, they realized that the greater the observed displacement of the assemblage point, the more astounding the reports of events and scenes experienced in dreams.

After this observation took hold of them, those sorcerers began to look avidly for opportunities to displace their own assemblage points. They ended up using psychotropic plants to accomplish this. Very quickly, they realized that the displacement brought about by using these plants was erratic, forced, and out of control. In the midst of this failure, nonetheless they discovered one thing of great value. They called it dreaming attention.

Don Juan explained this phenomenon, referring first to the daily awareness of human beings as the attention placed on the elements of the world of everyday life. He pointed out that human beings took only a cursory and yet sustained look at everything that surrounded them.

More than examining things, human beings simply established the presence of those elements by a special type of attention, a specific aspect of their general awareness. His contention was that the same type of cursory and yet sustained "look," so to speak, could be applied to the elements of an ordinary dream. He called this other, specific aspect of general awareness dreaming attention or the capacity that practitioners acquire to maintain their awareness unwaveringly fixed on the items of their dreams.

The cultivation of dreaming attention gave the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage a basic taxonomy of dreams. They found out that most of their dreams were imagery, products of the cognition of their daily world; however, there were some which escaped that classification. Such dreams were veritable states of heightened awareness in which the elements of the dream were not mere imagery, but energy-generating affairs. Dreams which had energy-generating elements were, for those shamans, dreams in which they were capable of seeing energy as it (lowed in the universe.

Those shamans were able to focus their dreaming attention on any element of their dreams, and found out, in this fashion, that there are two kinds of dreams. One is the dreams that we are all familiar with, in which phantasmagorical elements come into play, something which we could categorize as the product of our mentality, our psyche; perhaps something that has to do with our neurological makeup. The other kind of dreams they called energy-generating dreams. Don Juan said that those sorcerers of ancient times found themselves in dreams which were not dreams, but actual visitations made in a dreamlike state to bona fide places other than this world - real places, just like the world in which we live; places where the objects of the dream generated energy, just as lives, or animals, or even rocks generate energy in our daily world, for a seeing sorcerer.

Their visions of such places were, however, for those shamans, too fleeting, too temporary, to be of any value to them. They attributed this flaw to the fact that their assemblage points could not be held fixed for any considerable time at the position to which they had been displaced. Their attempts to remedy the situation resulted in the other high art of sorcery: the art of stalking.

Don Juan defined the two arts very clearly one day when he said to me that the art of dreaming consisted of purposely displacing the assemblage point from its habitual position. The art of stalking consisted in volitionally making it stay fixed on the new position to which it had been displaced.

This fixation allowed the shamans of ancient Mexico the opportunity to witness other worlds in their full extent. Don Juan said that some of those sorcerers never returned from their journeys. In other words, they opted for staying there, wherever "there" might have been.

"When the old sorcerers finished mapping human beings as luminous spheres," don Juan said to me once, "they had discovered no less than six hundred spots in the total luminous sphere that were the sites of bona fide worlds. Meaning that, if the assemblage point became attached to any of those places, the result was the entrance of the practitioner into a total new world."

"But where are those six hundred other worlds, don Juan?" I asked.

"The only answer to that question is incomprehensible," he said, laughing. "It's the essence of sorcery, and yet it means nothing to the average mind. Those six hundred worlds are in the position of the assemblage point. Incalculable amounts of energy are required to make sense out of this answer. We have the energy. What we lack is the facility or disposition to use it."

I could add that nothing could be truer than all these statements, and yet, nothing could make less sense.

Don Juan explained usual perception in the terms in which the sorcerers of his lineage understood it: The assemblage point, at its habitual location, receives an inflow of energy fields from the universe at large in the form of luminous filaments, numbering in the trillions. Since its position is consistently the same, it stood to sorcerers' reasoning that the same energy fields, in the form of luminous filaments, converge on the assemblage point and go through it, giving as a consistent result the perception of the world that we know. Those sorcerers arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that if the assemblage point were displaced to another position, another set of energy filaments would go through it, resulting in the perception of a world that, by definition, was not the same as the world of everyday life.

In don Juan's opinion, what human beings ordinarily regard as perceiving is rather the act of interpreting sensory data. He maintained that from the moment of birth, everything around us supplies us with a possibility of interpretation, and that with time, this possibility turns into a full system by means of which we conduct all of our perceptual transactions in the world.

He pointed out that the assemblage point is not only the center where perception is assembled, but also the center where the interpretation of sensory data is accomplished, so that if it were to change locations, it would interpret the new influx of energy fields in very much the same terms in which it interprets the world of everyday life. The result of this new interpretation is the perception of a world which is strangely similar to ours, and yet intrinsically different. Don Juan said that energetically, those other worlds are as different from ours as they could possibly be. It is only the interpretation of the assemblage point which accounts for the seeming similarities.