THE THIRD SERIES
The Series of the Five Concerns: The Westwood Series
The Second Group:
The Recapitulation
The recapitulation, according to what don Juan taught his disciples, was
a technique discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, and used by
every shaman practitioner from then on, to view and relive all the experiences
of their lives, in order to achieve two transcendental goals: one, the
abstract goal of fulfilling a universal code that demands that awareness
must he relinquished at the moment of death; and two, the extremely pragmatic
goal of acquiring perceptual fluidity.
He said that the formulation of their first goal was the result of observations
that those sorcerers made by means of their capacity to see energy
directly as it flows in the universe. They had seen that there exists
in the universe a gigantic force, an immense conglomerate of energy fields
which they called the Eagle, or the dark sea of awareness.
They observed that the dark sea of awareness is the force that lends
awareness to all living beings, from viruses to men. They believed that
it lends awareness to a newborn being, and that this being enhances that
awareness by means of its life experiences until a moment in which the
force demands its return.
In the understanding of those sorcerers, all living beings die because
they are forced to return the awareness lent to them. Sorcerers through
out the ages have understood that there is no way for what modern man calls
our linear mode of thinking to explain such a phenomenon, because there
is no room for a cause-and-effect line of reasoning as to why and how awareness
is lent and then taken back. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico viewed it
as an energetic fact of the universe, a fact that can't be explained
in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a purpose which can be determined
a priori.
The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage believed that to recapitulate meant
to give the dark sea of awareness what it was seeking: their life
experiences. They believed that by means of the recapitulation,
however, they could acquire a degree of control that could permit them
to separate their life experiences from their life force. For them, the
two were not inextricably intertwined; they were joined only circumstantially.
Those sorcerers affirmed that the dark sea of awareness doesn't
want to take the lives of human beings; it wants only their life experiences.
Lack of discipline in human beings prevents them from separating the two
forces, and in the end, they lose their lives, when it is meant that they
lose only the force of their life experiences. Those sorcerers viewed the
recapitulation as the procedure by which they could give the dark
sea of awareness a substitute for their lives. They gave up
their life experiences by recounting them, but they retained their life
force.
The perceptual claims of sorcerers, when examined in terms of the linear
concepts of our Western world, make no sense whatsoever. Western civilization
has been in contact with the shamans of the New World for five hundred
years, and there has never been a genuine attempt on the part of scholars
to formulate a serious philosophical discourse based on statements made
by those shamans. For instance, the recapitulation may seem to any
member of the Western world to be congruous with psychoanalysis, something
in the line of a psychological procedure, a sort of self-help technique.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
According to don Juan Matus, man always loses by default. In the case of
the premises of sorcery, he believed that Western man is missing a tremendous
opportunity for the enhancement of his awareness, and that the way in which
Western man relates himself to the universe, life, and awareness is only
one of a multiplicity of options.
To recapitulate, for shaman practitioners, means to give to an incomprehensible
force—the dark sea of awareness—the very thing it seems to be looking
for: their life experiences, that is to say, the awareness that they have
enhanced through those very life experiences. Since don Juan could not
possibly explain these phenomena to me in terms of standard logic, he said
that all that sorcerers could aspire to do was to accomplish the feat of
retaining their life force without knowing how it was done. He also said
that there were thousands of sorcerers who had achieved this. They had
retained their life force after they had given the dark sea of awareness
the force of their life experiences. This meant to don Juan that those
sorcerers didn't die in the usual sense in which we understand death, but
that they transcended it by retaining their life force and vanishing from
the face of the earth, embarked on a definitive journey of perception.
The belief of the shamans of don Juan's lineage was that when death takes
place in this fashion, all of our being is turned into energy, a special
kind of energy that retains the mark of our individuality. Don Juan tried
to explain this in a metaphorical sense, saying that we are composed of
a number of single nations: the nation of the lungs, the nation
of the heart, the nation of the stomach, the nation of the kidneys, and
so on. Each of these nations sometimes works independently of the others,
but at the moment of death, all of them are unified into one single entity.
The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage called this state total freedom.
For those sorcerers, death is a unifier, and not an annihilator, as it
is for the average man.
"Is this state immortality, don Juan?" I asked.
"This is in no way immortality," he replied. "It is merely the entrance
into an evolutionary process, using the only medium for evolution that
man has at his disposal: awareness. The sorcerers of my lineage were convinced
that man could not evolve biologically any further; therefore, they considered
man's awareness to be the only medium for evolution. At the moment of dying,
sorcerers are not annihilated by death, but are transformed into inorganic
beings: beings that have awareness, but not an organism. To be transformed
into an inorganic being was evolution for them, and it meant that a new,
indescribable type of awareness was lent to them, an awareness that would
last for veritably millions of years, but which would also someday have
to be returned to the giver: the dark sea of awareness."
One of the most important findings of the shamans of don Juan's lineage
was that, like everything else in the universe, our world is a combination
of two opposing, and at the same time complementary, forces. One of those
forces is the world we know, which those sorcerers called the world
of organic beings. The other force is something they called the
world of inorganic beings.
"The world of inorganic beings," don Juan said, "is populated by beings
that possess awareness, but not an organism. They are conglomerates of
energy fields, just like we are. To the eye of a seer, instead of being
luminous, as human beings are, they are rather opaque. They are not round,
but long, candlelike energetic configurations. They are, in essence, conglomerates
of energy fields which have cohesion and boundaries just like we do. They
are held together by the same agglutinating force that holds our energy
fields together."
"Where is this inorganic world, don Juan?" I asked.
"It is our twin world," he replied. "It occupies the same time and space
as our world, but the type of awareness of our world is so different from
the type of awareness of the inorganic world that we never notice the presence
of inorganic beings, although they do notice ours."
"Are those inorganic beings human beings that have evolved?" I asked.
"Not at all!" he exclaimed. "The inorganic beings of our twin world have
been intrinsically inorganic from the start, the same way that we have
always been intrinsically organic beings, also from the start. They are
beings whose consciousness can evolve just like ours, and it doubtlessly
does, but I have no firsthand knowledge of how this happens. What I do
know, however, is that a human being whose awareness has evolved is a bright,
luminescent, round inorganic being of a special kind."
Don Juan gave me a series of descriptions of this evolutionary process,
which I always took to be poetic metaphors. I singled out the one that
pleased me the most, which was total freedom. I fancied a human
being that enters into total freedom to be the most courageous,
the most imaginative being possible. Don Juan said that I was not fancying
anything at all—that to enter into total freedom, a human being
must call on his or her sublime side, which, he said, human beings have,
but which it never occurs to them to use.
Don Juan described the second, the pragmatic goal of the recapitulation
as the acquisition of fluidity. The sorcerers' rationale behind
this had to do with one of the most elusive subjects of sorcery: the assemblage
point, a point of intense luminosity the size of a tennis ball, perceivable
when sorcerers see a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields.
Sorcerers like don Juan see that trillions of energy fields in the
form of filaments of light from the universe at large converge on the assemblage
point and go through it. This confluence of filaments gives the assemblage
point its brilliancy. The assemblage point makes it possible
for a human being to perceive those trillions of energy filaments by turning
them into sensorial data. The assemblage point then interprets this
data as the world of everyday life, that is to say, in terms of human socialization
and human potential.
To recapitulate is to relive every, or nearly every, experience
that we have had, and in doing so to displace the assemblage point,
ever so slightly or a great deal, propelling it by the force of memory
to adopt the position that it had when the event being recapitulated
took place. This act of going back and forth from previous positions
to the current one gives the shaman practitioners the necessary fluidity
to withstand extraordinary odds in their journeys into infinity.
To the Tensegrity practitioners, the recapitulation gives the necessary
fluidity to withstand odds which are not in any way part of their habitual
cognition.
The recapitulation as a formal procedure was done in ancient times
by recollecting every person the practitioners knew and every experience
in which they had taken part. Don Juan suggested that in my case, which
is the case of modern man, I make a written list of all the persons that
I had met in my life, as a mnemonic device. Once I had written that list,
he proceeded to tell me how to use it. I had to take the first person on
the list, which went backwards in time from the present to the time of
my very first life experience, and set up, in my memory, my last interaction
with that first person on my list. This act is called arranging the
event to be recapitulated.
A detailed recollection of minutiae is required as the proper means to
hone one's capacity to remember. This recollection entails getting all
the pertinent physical details, such as the surroundings where the event
being recollected took place. Once the event is arranged, one should enter
into the locale itself, as if actually going into it, paying special attention
to any relevant physical configurations. If, for instance, the interaction
took place in an office, what should be remembered is the floor, the doors,
the walls, the pictures, the windows, the desks, the objects on the desks,
everything that could have been observed in a glance and then forgotten.
The recapitulation as a formal procedure must begin by the recounting
of events that have just taken place. In this fashion, the primacy of the
experience takes precedence. Something that has just happened is something
that one can remember with great accuracy. Sorcerers always count on the
fact that human beings are capable of storing detailed information that
they are not aware of, and that that detail is what the dark sea of
awareness is after.
The actual recapitulation of the event requires that one breathe
deeply, fanning the head, so to speak, very slowly and gently from side
to side, beginning on one side, left or right, whichever. This fanning
of the head was done as many times as needed, while remembering all the
details accessible. Don Juan said that sorcerers talked about this act
as breathing in all of one's own feelings spent in the event being recollected,
and expelling all the unwanted moods and extraneous feelings that were
left with us.
Sorcerers believe that the mystery of the recapitulation lies in
the act of inhaling and exhaling. Since breathing is a life-sustaining
function, sorcerers are certain that by means of it, one can also deliver
to the dark sea of awareness the facsimile of one's life experiences.
When I pressed don Juan for a rational explanation of this idea, his position
was that things like the recapitulation could only be experienced,
not explained. He said that in the act of doing, one can find liberation,
and that to explain it was to dissipate our energy in fruitless efforts.
His invitation was congruous with everything related to his knowledge:
the invitation to take action.
The list of names is used in the recapitulation as a mnemonic device
that propels memory into an inconceivable journey. Sorcerers' position
in this respect is that remembering events that have just taken place prepares
the ground for remembering events more distant in time with the same clarity
and immediacy. To recollect experiences in this way is to relive them,
and to draw from this recollection an extraordinary impetus that is capable
of stirring energy dispersed from our centers of vitality, and returning
it to them. Sorcerers refer to this redeployment of energy that
the recapitulation causes as gaining fluidity after giving the dark
sea of awareness what it is looking for.
On a more mundane level, the recapitulation gives practitioners
the capacity to examine the repetition in their lives. Recapitulating
can convince them, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all of us are
at the mercy of forces which ultimately make no sense, although
at first sight they seem perfectly reasonable; such as being at the mercy
of courtship. It seems that for some people, courtship is the pursuit of
a lifetime. I have personally heard from people of advanced age that the
only ideal that they had was to find a perfect companion, and that their
aspiration was to have perhaps one year of happiness in love.
Don Juan Matus used to say to me, over my vehement protests, that the problem
was that nobody really wanted to love anybody, but that every one of us
wanted to be loved. He said that this obsession with courtship,
taken at face value, was the most natural thing in the world to us. To
hear a seventy-five-year-old man or woman say that they are still in search
of a perfect companion is an affirmation of something idealistic, romantic,
beautiful. However, to examine this obsession in the context of the endless
repetitions of a lifetime makes it appear as it really is: something grotesque.
Don Juan assured me that if any behavioral change is going to be accomplished,
it has to be done through the recapitulation, since it is the only
vehicle that can enhance awareness by liberating one from the unvoiced
demands of socialization, which are so automatic, so taken for granted,
that they are not even noticed under normal conditions, much less examined.
The actual act of recapitulating is a lifetime endeavor. It takes
years to exhaust the list of people, especially for those who have made
the acquaintance of and have interacted with thousands of individuals.
This list is augmented by the memory of impersonal events in which no people
are involved, but which have to be examined because they are somehow related
to the person being recapitulated.
Don Juan asserted that what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico sought avidly
in recapitulating was the memory of interaction, because in inter
action lie the deep effects of socialization, which they struggled to overcome
by any means available.
THE MAGICAL PASSES
FOR THE RECAPITULATION
The recapitulation affects something that don Juan called the energy
body. He formally explained the energy body as a conglomerate
of energy fields that are the mirror image of the energy fields that make
up the human body when it is seen directly as energy. He said that
in the case of sorcerers, the physical body and the energy body are
one single unit. The magical passes for the recapitulation bring
the energy body to the physical body, which are essential for navigating
into the unknown.
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