When I told them about my concurrent memories the little sisters looked at me bewildered. La Gorda was the only one who seemed to be following what was happening to me. She laughed with true delight and said that the Nagual was right in saying that I was too lazy to remember what I had “seen”; therefore, I only bothered with what I had looked at.
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 defini-tion 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 sup-press 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; conse-quently, 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 hip-bones 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.”