La Gorda laughed and said that she understood why I had caused the Nagual such an intense concern. She had seen for herself that I indulged beyond my limits. She sat against the pole next to me and said that she and the little sisters were going to gaze into the Nagual’s power place. She then made a piercing birdcall. A moment later the little sisters came out of the house and sat down to gaze with her.
Their gazing mastery was obvious. Their bodies acquired a strange rigidity. They did not seem to be breathing at all. Their stillness was so contagious that I caught myself half closing my eyes and staring into the hills.
Gazing had been a true revelation to me. In performing it I had corroborated some important issues of don Juan’s teachings. La Gorda had delineated the task in a definitely vague manner. “To zoom in on it” was more a command than a description of a process, and yet it was a description, providing that one essential requirement had been fulfilled; don Juan had called that requirement stopping the internal dialogue. From la Gorda’s statements about gazing it was obvious to me that the effect don Juan had been after in making them gaze was to teach them to stop the internal dialogue. La Gorda had expressed it as “quieting down the thoughts.” Don Juan had taught me to do that very same thing, although he had made me follow the opposite path; instead of teaching me to focus my view, as gazers did, he taught me to open it, to flood my awareness by not focusing my sight on anything. I had to sort of feel with my eyes everything in the 180 – degree range in front of me, while I kept my eyes unfocused just above the line of the horizon.
It was very difficult for me to gaze, because it entailed reversing that training. As I tried to gaze, my tendency was to open up. The effort of keeping that tendency in check, however, made me shut off my thoughts. Once I had turned off my internal dialogue, it was not difficult to gaze as la Gorda had prescribed.
Don Juan had asserted time and time again that the essential feature of his sorcery was shutting off the internal dialogue. In terms of the explanation la Gorda had given me about the two realms of attention, stopping the internal dialogue was an operational way of describing the act of disengaging the attention of the tonal.
Don Juan had also said that once we stop our internal dialogue we also stop the world. That was an operational description of the inconceivable process of focusing our second attention. He had said that some part of us is always kept under lock and key because we are afraid of it, and that to our reason, that part of us was like an insane relative that we keep locked in a dungeon. That part was, in la Gorda’s terms, our second attention, and when it finally could focus on something the world stopped. Since we, as average men, know only the attention of the tonal, it is not too farfetched to say that once that attention is canceled, the world indeed has to stop. The focusing of our wild, untrained second attention has to be, perforce, terrifying. Don Juan was right in saying that the only way to keep that insane relative from bursting in on us was by shielding ourselves with our endless internal dialogue.
La Gorda and the little sisters stood up after perhaps thirty minutes of gazing. La Gorda signaled me with her head to follow them. They went to the kitchen. La Gorda pointed to a bench for me to sit on. She said that she was going up the road to meet the Genaros and bring them over. She left through the front door.
The little sisters sat around me. Lidia volunteered to answer anything I wanted to ask her. I asked her to tell me about her gazing into don Juan’s power spot, but she did not understand me.
“I’m a distance and shadow gazer,” she said. “After I be-came a gazer the Nagual made me start all over again and had me gaze this time at the shadows of leaves and plants and trees and rocks. Now I never look at anything anymore; I just look at their shadows. Even if there is no light at all, there are shadows; even at night there are shadows. Because I’m a shadow gazer I’m also a distance gazer. I can gaze at shadows even in the distance.
“The shadows in the early morning don’t tell much. The shadows rest at that time. So it’s useless to gaze very early in the day. Around six in the morning the shadows wake up, and they are best around five in the afternoon. Then they are fully awake.”
“What do the shadows tell you?”
“Everything I want to know. They tell me things because they have heat, or cold, or because they move, or because they have colors. I don’t know yet all the things that colors and heat and cold mean. The Nagual left it up to me to learn.”
“How do you learn?”
“In my dreaming. Dreamers must gaze in order to do dreaming and then they must look for their dreams in their gazing. For example, the Nagual made me gaze at the shadows of rocks, and then in my dreaming I found out that those shadows had light, so I looked for the light in the shadows from then on until I found it. Gazing and dreaming go together. It took me a lot of gazing at shadows to get my dreaming of shadows going. And then it took me a lot of dreaming and gazing to get the two together and really see in the shadows what I was seeing in my dreaming. See what I mean? Everyone of us does the same. Rosa’s dreaming is about trees because she’s a tree gazer and Josefina’s is about clouds because she’s a cloud gazer. They gaze at trees and clouds until they match their dreaming”
Rosa and Josefina shook their heads in agreement.
“What about la Gorda?” I asked.
“She’s a flea gazer,” Rosa said, and all of them laughed.
“La Gorda doesn’t like to be bitten by fleas,” Lidia explained. “She is formless and can gaze at anything, but she used to be a rain gazer.”
“What about Pablito?”
“He gazes at women’s crotches,” Rosa answered with a deadpan expression.
They laughed. Rosa slapped me on the back.
“I understand that since he’s your partner he’s taking after you,” she said.
They banged on the table and shook the benches with their feet as they laughed.
“Pablito is a rock gazer,” Lidia said. “Nestor is a rain and plant gazer and Benigno is a distance gazer. But don’t ask me any more about gazing because I will lose my power if I tell you more.”
“How come la Gorda tells me everything?”
“La Gorda lost her form,” Lidia replied. “Whenever I lose mine I’ll tell you everything too. But by then you won’t care to hear it. You care only because you’re stupid like us. The day we lose our form we’ll all stop being stupid.”
“Why do you ask so many questions when you know all this?” Rosa asked.
“Because he’s like us,” Lidia said. “He’s not a true nagual. He’s still a man.”
She turned and faced me. For an instant her face was hard and her eyes piercing and cold, but her expression softened as she spoke to me.
“You and Pablito are partners,” she said. “You really like him, don’t you?”
I thought for a moment before I answered. I told her that somehow I trusted him implicitly. For no overt reason at all I had a feeling of kinship with him.
“You like him so much that you fouled him up,” she said in an accusing tone. “On that mountaintop where you jumped, he was getting to his second attention by himself and you forced him to jump with you.”
“I only held him by the arm,” I said in protest.
“A sorcerer doesn’t hold another sorcerer by the arm,” she said. “Each of us is very capable. You don’t need any of us three to help you. Only a sorcerer who sees and is formless can help. On that mountaintop where you jumped, you were supposed to go first. Now Pablito is tied to you. I suppose you intended to help us in the same way. God, the more I think about you, the more I despise you.”
Rosa and Josefina mumbled their agreement. Rosa stood up and faced me with rage in her eyes. She demanded to know what I intended to do with them. I said that I intended to leave very soon. My statement seemed to shock them. They all spoke at the same time. Lidia’s voice rose above the others. She said that the time to leave had been the night before, and that she had hated it the moment I decided to stay. Josefina began to yell obscenities at me.