On many occasions when I listened to Carlos, he referred to the topic of energy. Each time, he would explain different aspects of it. I have gathered some of them in this chapter, to give the reader a more coherent view.
His teachings, or rather the teachings of the tradition of seers to which he belonged, begin with the fact that the universe is dual. It is formed by two forces which the old seers symbolized by means of two snakes that are intertwined. But those forces have nothing to do with the dualities we call good and bad, God and Devil, positive and negative, or any other kind of opposing pairs we can think of coherently. Rather, they constitute an inexplicable wave of energy which the Toltecs called the tonal and the nagual.
In an axiomatic way, they established that everything we can interpret or imagine in any way is the tonal, and the rest, which we cannot categorize, is the nagual.
To emphasize that they are not two antagonistic realities, but rather two complementary aspects of one unique force, which they nicknamed 'the Eagle', the seers compared the tonal and the nagual with the two sides of our physical body, the right side and the left side. And they saw that, just as the basic configuration of organisms is almost totally structured from a bilateral symmetry, these are also the forms in which energy manifests itself in the Cosmos, and with it, the way we perceive.
Life is formed when a portion of the free energy of infinity - which the old seers called 'the emanations of the Eagle' - is encapsulated by an external force, becoming a new individual being, aware of himself. And they saw that the perception of the
world happens when something they called 'the assemblage point of perception' comes into play.
Although that center of selection is in operation in every living being in the universe, the deliberate awareness of oneself, on this Earth, can only be achieved by human beings and a group of species lacking physical organization, whom the seers of antiquity called 'allies'. Interaction between man and these beings is not only feasible, it is something that frequently happens in our dreams.
Sorcerers cultivate it, since the consciousness of inorganic beings, which are much older than us, is filled with something that we all covet: Knowledge.
Having taken on the work of investigating the modes of energy, the sages from old Mexico were urged to describe to their contemporaries what they had discovered. In their effort to find the most appropriate terms, they said that all that exists is divided into light and dark, like day and night. And from there they derived every thinkable binary description. It is a command which reflects the great cosmic duality.
Through their seeing, they discovered that the world of energy is made up of extensive areas of darkness, sprinkled with tiny points of light, and they perceived that the dark areas correspond to the feminine part of the energy, while bright areas correspond to the masculine. They arrived at the inevitable conclusion that the universe is almost in its entirety feminine, and that the bright energy, the masculine, is rare.
By definition, they associated darkness with the left side, the nagual, the unknown, and the feminine; and luminosity with the right side, the tonal, the known, and the masculine.
Continuing their observations, they saw that the act of galactic creation happens when the cosmic darkness contracts itself, and from it arises an explosion of light, a spark that expands, giving origin to the order of time and space. The law of this order is that
things always have an end, which again implies that the unique and perennial principle of the universe is the dark energy; feminine, creative, and eternal.
Likewise, man is divided into the tonal, represented by his daytime vigil, and the nagual, by his dreams at night.
From these observations, the rest of the wisdom of the naguals is derived. They teach that dreams are a doorway to power because, ultimately, what sustains us is the dark energy, to which we go periodically to be renewed. Consequently, they directed all their power towards perfecting the art of becoming conscious while in the state of dreaming. They called that special kind of attention 'dreaming', and they used it to deliberately explore the dark energy and come into contact with the source of the universe. In that way, the initial observation of the wise Toltecs became a practical knowledge.
One of Carlos' more frequent statements was that the opinions that we form about everything transform our world into something more and more predictable, until the possibility of visiting other worlds becomes a fairy tale.
"For modern man", he said on one occasion, "absolutely everything that exists is put into definite categories. We are labeling machines. We classify the world, and the world classifies us. If once you killed a dog, you are the dog-killer for the rest of your life, even if you never touched another one. And those classifications are inherited!"
He mentioned a series of funny and expressive last names that were related to the characteristics of a particular person, but then the names were bequeathed as an imposition on their descendants. It went to show that, energetically, people are marked.
He asserted that the greatest example of that absurd propensity to classify us is what believers call 'original sin', the sin of Adam and Eve, which-makes us all forever sinful and also, makes us all behave as sinners.
"We have become perceptual jailers of each other. The chain of human thought is powerful.
"Even our deepest feelings are classified and ordered so that nothing can escape. One example is the way we alienate ourselves from the actual time we are living in, in order to mindlessly go around repeating stereotypes. We have a collection of preset days: Mother's Day, All Saints' Day, Valentine Day, birthday anniversaries and weddings... They are like stakes we tie our life to so we won't get lost, and thus we walk the Earth, revolving around our descriptions like beasts tied by the neck."
He told us about when he and Don Juan once traveled to a small town in the north of Mexico, and sat down to rest on a bench in the church square. Suddenly, ten or twelve youths came carrying a Judas figure made of cloth and canes. It was dressed in a blanket and sandals, like an Indian. They installed it in the town square, and that night there was a public burning. Everybody drank, and everybody took turns insulting the puppet as part of the ritual.
"With customs like that, people keep Judas alive. They remember him, they sustain him, they keep him in a true hell with their memories. And, after burning him, next year they resuscitate him, and kill him again. The rigidity of human behavior is revealed in those routines."
A person in the audience requested permission to speak and asked him whether his statement regarding how, by remembering him, the town keeps Judas alive, was meant literally or was just a metaphor.
He answered:
"Sorcerers affirm that as long as there is memory, there is awareness of being, since the current of thought is an injection of life. True death is oblivion.
"The idea that time moves in a straight line from past to future is completely primitive, something that goes against the experience of sorcerers and even of modern science. Due to that limited interpretation, most of humanity is kept prisoner in a tunnel of time, where their destiny becomes an infinite repetition of the same.
"The reality of our condition is that we are energetically blocked, due to what sorcerers call 'the collective fixation of the assemblage point.'
"A remarkable consequence of that fixation is the way we specialize. When preparing for a profession, for example, instead of widening our scope, we usually end up becoming sedentary, boring individuals, without creativity and without motivation. In a few years, our life becomes tedious, but, far from taking responsibility and changing ourselves, we blame our circumstances.
"One of the most serious habits that shape our inventory, is the habit of telling others everything we do, or stop doing. It is an important part of socialization. We want to generate an exclusive image of ourselves, but the image ends up molding itself to other people's expectations, and we become imitations of what we could be. Once they consider us as facts, we have to follow certain behavioral patterns, even when we are sick of them or even if we don't believe in them, because any intent to change puts us up against the wall.
"Most people feel empty when they don't have love or friends, because they have built their life on a superficial base of relationships and they don't have any time left to ponder their destiny. Unfortunately, friendship is generally based on an exchange of intimacies, while a basic premise of mundane relationships is that everything we say some day will be used against us. It's a sad fact that the ones we care about the most, are also our worst headaches!
"Sorcerers maintain that talking about ourselves makes us accessible and weak, while learning how to be quiet fills us with power. A principle of the path of knowledge is to turn your own life into something so unpredictable that not even you yourself knows what's going to happen.
"The only way of leaving the collective inventory is moving away from those who know us well. After a time, mental walls that trap us become a little softer and they start to give in. That's when genuine opportunities for change appear and we can take control of our lives.
"If we were able to transcend interpretation and face pure perception without prejudice, the impression of a world of objects would vanish. In its place, we would witness energy as it flows in the universe. Under such conditions, the chain of other people's thoughts would no longer have the smallest effect on us and we would not feel obliged to be or do anything. Then our senses would have no limits. That's seeing."
He defined it further:
"The sorcerer's objective is to break the fixation of social interpretations, and to see energy directly. To see is a total perceptual experience."
"Seeing energy as it flows is an imperious need on the path of knowledge. Ultimately, all the effort of sorcerers is guided to that end. It is not enough for a warrior to know that the universe is energy; he has to verify it for himself."
"Seeing is a practical matter which has immediate consequences and far-reaching effects on our lives. The most dramatic of them is that sorcerers learn to see time, as an objective dimension." He continued by saying that energy is distributed through the universe in layers. All conscious beings belong to one of these
Everyday love ends up becoming a debt, when others claim from us the same attention they gave us. And a debt of feelings is something fatal!
"For these reasons, one of priorities of a teacher is to destroy the apprentice's sexual patterns. This is a crucial matter that requires lifelong work, but it is necessary to begin from the first moment, because becoming a member of a party of sorcerers cannot be used as a pretext for sexual deficiencies. If we don't solve that matter as ordinary men and women, our chances to advance on the warrior's path are very slim.
"Sorcerers have many ways of correcting an apprentice. Some don't have any scruples and subject the pupil to real tortures, attacking his weaknesses until he gets cured or he cracks. Others, like my teacher, are extremely delicate on this point and prefer to work with the energy from inside, making the apprentice become aware of himself and react. Any method is legitimate, as long as it produces the results desired.
"The nagual Julian, for example, combined a merciless efficiency with a tremendous ability to become what he wanted - it is not that he acted; rather, he genuinely transformed himself, moving his assemblage point to the position corresponding to the form of an animal or another person. One of his favorites was the form of a woman. Once, in the shape of a beautiful girl, he seduced his apprentice Juan Matus, who at that time was barely twenty years old, and hot as a young bull. When they were both in bed, he moved his assemblage point back to its habitual position and was a man again, which made the youth run terrified from the room.
"For a mentality like the one Juan Matus had at that time, the impact was devastating. It demolished his stereotypes. It was a grotesque joke, but uniquely effective. In one slash, it broke his inclination to surrender to the first female who made herself available.
"Don Juan never forgave his teacher for the joke, but as time passed, he learned how to laugh at the story."
At this point, Carlos allowed a small round of questions.
One of the present interrogated him regarding celibacy; whether it was indispensable or not for sorcerers, and what the advantages were.
He answered:
"A priori, sorcerers are neither for nor against anything. They see that everything .depends on the congenital disposition of energy. There are some who are born with the necessary passion to make love every day, while others don't even have enough for a masturbation. Some recover their luminous totality by means of discipline, others have the appearance of strainers and will die incomplete. All these factors modify and determine the behavior of sorcerers regarding sex.
"What characterizes sorcerers is their refusal to be victims of the collective reproductive command, and their ability to choose a responsible use for their energy. Also, none of them can be trapped in any sexual category. They are free, they proceed every moment according to what power indicates to them. To have that vision, they cultivate a sobriety that the ordinary person doesn't know."
He explained that, in general, the new seers opt for a position of celibacy and self-sufficiency, because they are very greedy with their energy and they prefer to dedicate it to the expansion of their awareness. They have witnessed worlds on their journeys into infinity that make all other things seem pale and without attraction, even the sexual act.
"Don Juan said that making love is for those who don't have attachments."
Responding to another question, he said that there is no such thing as 'a sexual problem', only individuals with their own and very particular dilemmas to solve.
"To see it in a generic form is a trap, because it makes us dilute our responsibility and excuse ourselves with the notion that everybody else is the same as we are. Like birth and death, to procreate is an individual act, a gift which the Eagle has granted us. What sorcerers demand is something very simple: Responsibility.
"The society in which we live is a school where they force us to comply with astonishingly cruel orders. We become old, and making love turns into a grotesque parody. Society imposes a drainage on us, a preset behavior that doesn't stop until there is not a single blink of light left in us.
"I had an example of this in my grandfather. The old man used to say: 'You cannot fuck them all, but you have to try!' He already had one foot in the grave, and still kept reacting the way they had taught him. He spent half his time getting a woman and the other half working to maintain her, and he never realized that he had never been shown
"Finally, on his deathbed, the old man became bitter with the idea that his lovers didn't want him for his manliness anymore, but for his money. 'She doesn't love me!' he whimpered, and his grandsons assured him: 'She does love you, grandpa!' The stupid man died this way, screaming: 'Here I come, mommy!'
"Is it necessary to be a sorcerer to grasp that this is not all we can have as human beings?"
He admitted that, before deciding to practice the warrior's way, he believed he was a seductive man and he behaved as one, driven by the latin male stereotype,
"Once I seduced a girl and brought her to my car. We both got so horny that the windshield got all steamed up with all the kisses and hugs we gave each other. When I was most turned on, I discovered that the supposed girl was a man!
"Another time I fell sincerely in love with a young girl, but eventually I began to suspect that she cheated on me. I changed
my car and stayed watching from the corner of her house. The other one arrived. When I asked her to explain, she told me: 'With you, it's love, and with him it's just sex!'
"This kind of encounters made me decide to behave with more moderation in my love affairs. But the pressure of my stereotype was too strong. I continued to spend my energy on sex according to the pattern of my race, until Don Juan gave me the choice: Either I had to calm down, or abandon the apprenticeship."
Responding to another question, he maintained that the best way of stopping the energy drainage that takes place through sexuality, is learning how to make magnanimous gestures which counter and loosen the fixation of our attention.
"We have received life as a cosmic gift, and it is our privilege to reflect that gesture with total detachment. Thanks to his indifference, the warrior is in the position of turning his love into a blank check, unconditional, an abstract affection, because it does not start from desire. What a marvelous thing!
"Contrary to what a man in the street thinks, the nature of sorcerers is telluric, passionate. But the object of their passion is no longer carnal. They have seen the glue that ties all things together, a wave of passion that floods the universe and cannot be stopped, because, should that happen, everything would be reduced to nothing.
"Through their seeing, they have established their base on the cornerstone of awareness, the most powerful state of individual attention. Their love is an overpowering reality that vibrates in every breath, is expressed in every gesture, and given meaning in every word; it is a force which impels them to explore, to take risks, and to evolve, constantly bringing out the best of themselves.
"Sorcerers have discovered the most refined form of love, because they love themselves. They know that all we give out is a reflection of what we have inside. They have put the power of
passion to the service of being, and it gives them the necessary impulse to undertake the only quest that counts: The quest for oneself."