tonals from a distance in order to have a better grasp of what
was really around them. He made them walk to a ridge from
where they could view the whole area. From there the table
was hardly visible. He then made them go back to the table
and had them all loom over it in order to show that an average
man does not have the grasp that a sorcerer has because an
average man is right on top of his table, holding onto every
item on it.
He then made each of them, one at a time, casually look at
the objects on the table, and tested their recall by taking some-
thing and hiding it, to see if they had been attentive. All of
them passed the test with flying colors. He pointed out to
them that their ability to remember so easily the items on that
table was due to the fact that all of them had developed their
attention of the tonal, or their attention over the table.
He next asked them to look casually at everything that was
on the ground underneath the table, and tested their recall by
removing the rocks, twigs or whatever else was there. None
of them could remember what they had seen under the table.
The Nagual then swept everything off the top of the table
and made each of them, one at a time, lie across it on their
stomachs and carefully examine the ground underneath. He
explained to them that for a sorcerer the nagual was the area
just underneath the table. Since it was unthinkable to tackle the
immensity of the nagual, as exemplified by that vast, desolate
place, sorcerers took as their domain of activity the area
directly below the island of the tonal, as graphically shown by
what was underneath that table. That area was the domain of
what he called the second attention, or the attention of the
nagual, or the attention under the table. That attention was
reached only after warriors had swept the top of their tables
clean. He said that reaching the second attention made the two
attentions into a single unit, and that unit was the totality of
oneself.
La Gorda said that his demonstration was so clear to her
that she understood at once why the Nagual had made her
clean her own life, sweep her island of the tonal, as he had
called it. She felt that she had indeed been fortunate in having
followed every suggestion that he had put to her. She was still
a long way from unifying her two attentions, but her diligence
had resulted in an impeccable life, which was, as he had as-
sured her, the only way for her to lose her human form.
Losing the human form was the essential requirement for
unifying the two attentions.
The attention under the table is the key to everything sor-
cerers do, she went on. In order to reach that attention the
Nagual and Genaro taught us dreaming, and you were taught
about power plants. I don’t know what they did to you to
teach you how to trap your second attention with power
plants, but to teach us how to do dreaming, the Nagual taught
us gazing. He never told us what he was really doing to us. He
just taught us to gaze. We never knew that gazing was the way
to trap our second attention. We thought gazing was just for
fun. That was not so. Dreamers have to be gazers before they
can trap their second attention.
The first thing the Nagual did was to put a dry leaf on the
ground and make me look at it for hours. Every day he
brought a leaf and put it in front of me. At first I thought that
it was the same leaf that he saved from day to day, but then I
noticed that leaves are different. The Nagual said that when
we realized that, we are not looking anymore, but gazing.
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 atten-
tion hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something
else. The Nagual called the moment when the second atten-
tion 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 predilec-
tion, 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 per-
ceptual catharsis in me, that of turning into a crow and perceiv-
ing the world as a crow. The result was that I perceived the
world in a manner that could not have possibly been part of