SAN DIEGO'S SUPERSTAR SHAMAN

One night in the late 1970s, Miguel Ruiz, a young Mexican physician, fell sleep at the wheel of his car and crashed it into a concrete retaining wall. He lay near death for some days and had that near-death experience of being out of his body. He saw his body from another vantage point.

But if he saw his body, where was he when he saw it? And if he was not his body, what was he? The last of 13 children, Ruiz had grown up in rural Mexico and come from a line of curanderos, shaman healers. His mother, Sarita, was such a healer. Although she'd taught him as a child, he'd resisted the ancient tradition and pursued the Western practice of medicine. Now after the accident, Ruiz began to study again with Sarita and he became an apprentice to a powerful nagual, a sorcerer in the Toltec tradition.

Today Ruiz trains Toltec naguals (pronounced nah-WAL) in San Diego. He has owned a house here since 1985. His audience ranges from old hippies to academics and professionals who have never before deviated from the approved career path. There are hundreds of his followers in San Diego, but Ruiz's work has also spread nationwide and worldwide through the popularity of his books The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love.

I've long been a fan and student of the books of Carlos Castaneda. He popularized Toltec sorcery with a series of nine books, which he began writing in the late 1960s. Castaneda's teacher, an old Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus, made his home in a shack, rambled around the desert, and lived a carefully, deliberately anonymous life. Castaneda also stayed out of the public eye. In contrast, Ruiz has a website (miguelruiz.com) on which he advertises "power journeys" to Teotihuacan in Mexico, to Machu Picchu in Peru, to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, to a volcano on Maui. There are links for "wisdom groups" and for "mentors." There is a discussion of something called the University of Transformation. This is about as far as you can get from rambling in the desert. It seemed clear to me that without the popularity of the Castaneda books, Ruiz would not have had entree to the educated and affluent middle class, and that his credentials as a medical doctor, a well-educated man in the Western sense, cemented his validity to that audience. I wondered if Ruiz was really a sorcerer. I decided to go to see him.

When Ruiz opened his front door, my feelings about him were immediate. Before me stood a slender, Mexican Indian man in his early 50s, of average height, in gray slacks and a maroon velour pullover. Before he opened his mouth or moved a muscle, I liked him and trusted him. Looking into Ruiz's eyes is like drowning in warm honey. He grabbed me in a hug, not something they do much where I come from.

We took seats in his comfortable living room. It was severely modern, with glass shelves and tabletops at varying heights and the back wall open to the sunlight. The effect was of being in a silver maze. I set up my tape recorder, then asked, "How did you become a Toltec shaman?"

Ruiz smiled. His voice was low and soft, accented, but with each word pronounced so carefully that understanding him was never a problem. "Well, it's a family tradition, really. My mother is a great healer. She's 93 years old now, and I started to learn from her when I was still a child. Her father, my grandfather, Don Leonardo, he was a powerful nagual  too. Leonardo Macias. His father, Don Eziquiel, was also a great nagual. He lived to 117 years.

"I didn't meet my great-grandfather. I only heard all those great stories about him. I think he was the first nagual  in the lineage, in the family. And from him you can trace all the way back to the Mexicas, whom you call the Aztecs."

"Who were the Toltecs?"

"Well, the Toltecs, the name Toltec means 'artist.' A Toltec is an artist, not really a nation. History and anthropology think they were a nation. They have a very strong influence in Mexico. They started more than 2000 years ago, built the pyramids of Teotihuacan 2500 years ago. Before that, there were already Toltecs. It's a way of living. It comes from what I call just common sense, available to everybody. But very few have the fortune to learn it."

"I liked your book, The Four Agreements," I said. "I wonder if any of your students have told you ways the book helped them?"

"All the time. I receive a lot of mail from Europe, a lot of mail from the United States, and also from Latin America, from everywhere, really. You know, to write this book, it was a big challenge, to make it very simple and easy and short enough that anyone can read it, can understand it and apply it. To put it in action, that is the key of the book. That everybody can put it in action and see the difference that makes in their lives.

"When they understand what the book says, they start taking action, and right away they start seeing changes in their lives, until they reach a certain point. They're stuck at that point, and that's the time to read the book again. Then, it's like they're reading another book, because all the limitations that they used to have, they have already dissolved, and they reach another point. They have another 'Aha!' And they start shifting again. "You find out after you read it that you knew all that. It's something that you knew since you were a child. But for whatever reason, it all shifted, was distorted. When you read that book, little by little you discover that you are not really what you think you are. You are much, much better than that."

"Do you know how many copies of this book have been sold?" "More than three million. And the beautiful part is that mainly it's word of mouth. It's true that Oprah read it and gave it a big boost. But whoever reads it, right away they think of the people they love, so it keeps growing in that way."

"I get the impression that your more popular books -- The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love -- are for just regular folks. But you seem to be on a double track here in that you're training people in Toltec nagualism, you're teaching apprentices." "Yes, I teach what I call Dreaming. I have a whole Dream school, and there are teachers there who teach the others."

I was curious as to how what he called "Dreaming" related to other spiritual practices. I said, "My sister, she's a magical person. She used to do what she called 'astral traveling.' I couldn't do it. But I do write fiction. My feeling is that when you write fiction, that you are Dreaming."

"Yes, you are Dreaming. Certainly, right now. Certainly, all the time."

"That part's true," I said. "This is a level of Dreaming. And that's another level of Dreams."

He shook his head. "The way your sister approaches it is a different way than you do. You just don't know that you are Dreaming, and you call it your imagination. That you write science fiction, or whatever you write, is in your imagination. And it's true that you are traveling into a virtual reality that is real. Because everything here is just a virtual reality that is happening in your brain. It's not exactly true."

"So this world is a screen, and we're just running our movies on it."

"Yes."

"And what you're teaching is how to put a happy ending on it."

"That's exactly the direction that a Dream Master has. You know, like Itold you before, the word Toltec means 'artist.' And the art that we practice, really, is the art of Dreams. As with every art, we enjoy the art. That's why we do it.

"You know, your whole life is really a story that you create. And that includes your parents, your brother. It's true that they exist. Yes, your father exists. But in the story that you create, you give them...they become characters in your story. It doesn't mean that they are what you believe." He smiled and cocked his head.

"In your story your father is a certain way. Your mother is a certain way. That's what you believe, but that doesn't mean it's true. It's only true in your story. If you compare notes, you will find out your father is not what you believe he is. Your mother is not what you believe she is. Your children are not what you believe they are.

"And even going a little deeper, you find out that you are not what you believe you are. This is a place in *dreams* when your whole reality starts coming apart. What you believed you are is not what you are but what you pretended to be for so long."

"How many Toltec naguals have you trained, do you think?"

"I think there are a lot of them. The main two ones are my own children, but there are many others that are really masters."

The bookends of Ruiz's career are the traffic accident and a massive heart attack in 2002 that nearly killed him. Since then, he has -- at least in theory -- worked a reduced schedule, laboring to set up his sons, Miguel Jr., who lives in Santa Monica, and Jose Luis, who lives in San Diego, and in time, his youngest son, Leonardo to follow in his footsteps.

"What are your students -- the actual naguals that you've changed -- what are they doing with this knowledge?"

"Well, they're doing so many different things. You know, when you teach them, what you really teach is about themselves. And everybody is completely different. Then, what they do is to have a way of life that

makes them happy. Just a few of them try to be teachers. But many others, they are artists, they paint and they draw beautiful art.

"The other kind of artists are the actors. There are medical doctors, lawyers, engineers. They are all kinds of people, and what they are doing, they keep going with their life in their way but with awareness. Now they know what they are doing, and they do it with a purpose. And mainly the purpose that they have is about giving. It's no longer to receive. That becomes secondary. And by giving they are receiving much more than they give."

I wondered how this was accomplished. "What is the University of Transformation?"

"It was created because of the need that we had to go to the next level of Dreaming. To have a place specifically where they have a place to sit in a chair, to go into Dreaming, and see their confirmation. This is a very intense work that they do.

"All that started four years ago, on my last journey to Egypt. Then one of my apprentices, she insisted that I teach Dreaming. So I told her no. But she was insisting, and I said, 'Okay, let's make a deal. Get 40 people who would really want it so bad that they agree for a whole year not to fail one Dreaming. If you can do that, I will teach Dreaming.'

"When I told her that, I didn't think that she could get even 5 people who would really commit themselves. And she came back to me with much more than 40 people. To my surprise, they did it. They did four years of Dreaming."

"Okay," I said, "University of Transformation. Transform from what to what?"

"From a victim to a warrior. From living without awareness to living fully aware. And that starts with yourself. In order to give, first you must have. And what you don't have is awareness."

"In Castaneda," I said, "I think he hooked his audience in the early '70s with tales of psychotropic plants and also with tales of miraculous events.  Y'know, Don Juan disappeared Carlos's car under a hat, and..."

"Those were real stories."

"My question is, are they metaphorical or are they..."

"Okay, this is a great question for Don Carlos. But I can make an assumption that, yes, that was real. And, yes, they are metaphoric, but they are real at the same time. Like, in front of my apprentices, I perform so many miracles."

"Describe one, please."

"Well, for example, I took like 40 people to Peru. We were in Machu Picchu, at the very top. It was during the night. We were outside, just relaxing. There were around 20 people with me at that time. The night was very clear. Crystal clear. You could see far away. I told them, 'What would you guys think if in less than one minute the whole environment becomes covered by fog, so that you cannot see anything?'

"They said, 'Well, that would be cool.' That's what they said.

"And when I said that, you could see from the mountains the fog coming. In less than one minute it was so dense we could not see each other. And then, when we were like that, I told them, 'And now, what would you guys think if in less than one minute the fog just dissipates?' And as soon as I said that, the fog started going away. You saw it going away, and the night was as clear as in the beginning. And if you ask me how I did that, the answer is, I have no idea."

"How does Toltec Dreaming differ from normal dreaming?"

"Awareness, that is the difference. You know, we live in a world with six billion people. And those people are not aware that they're dreaming. They're born, they grow up, they get old, they die, and they didn't know that their whole life was just a dream. Once you are aware, you find out that it isn't exactly true that life has all the power over you."

I had read about a Toltec technique called "The Art of Stalking." I thought of it as using the attitude of a hunter to analyze and master your own will. I asked Ruiz to describe it.

"Well, once you have awareness, and once you master your head. You can choose every action, and by choosing the action, you can see the possible reaction. Then you see that your whole life you were victimized by your beliefs. You find that you have an advantage over the rest of the people because you are no longer naive."

"You mean you track down your misconceptions and change them?"

"Oh,  definitely. Yes."

In the Castaneda books, one becomes a sorcerer by capturing an "ally spirit." The way it's described, it's like capturing a demon and taming it into an angel. But in reading other Toltec writings and about other disciplines, I'd come to believe it meant getting a handle on the lousy

attitudes that ruin our lives: greed, lust, vanity, all that stuff. "I wanted to ask you about the ally spirits. I think they're a metaphor for what in our culture we call neuroses."

"Uh-huh."

"And also they're a metaphor for archetypes. I wanted to know if you

think that surmise is correct."

"You know, there's a lot of what I call inorganic beings that exist. And they are in many ways available to us. All that comes from emotions, concepts, beliefs. If you see in your brain, it's full of information, but it's information that doesn't exist in the material world. It's a kind of energy that you can't touch, you can't measure, you can't weigh it. It will not survive the scientific method. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. You hear so many voices in your head. Who are you talking to? Who is talking to you? And all that is not matter but exists."

"Because it has effects?"

"Exactly. It exists and makes you act in certain ways. Okay, then, with imagination, we try to express the existence of this kind of life to everybody. We can draw them, or whatever, whatever our imagination says they look like. It's not exactly true, but those things exist."

Ruiz told me that the only way to experience what he was talking about was to go with him to Teotihuacan, an ancient ruin about 31 miles northeast of Mexico City. He and Jose Luis were leading a group there in a week. The five-day trip was already full, but he would give his assistants directions to make a place for me.

Before we left for Teotihuacan I wanted to meet Jose Luis. He and his wife, Judy Segal, have a house in an upscale neighborhood of Chula Vista. Its front is plain, but inside it's a roomy two-story house with a two-story atrium living room.

I sat on a couch, and Segal, slender, big-eyed, dark, and intense, sat on another couch across a huge glass coffee table. To my left was a print of a Klimpt painting, The Kiss, a stylized couple embracing under a blanket shot through with gold. On the far wall, across the living and dining rooms, next to glass doors to the back yard, was an enormous Buddha, lacquered deep maroon. Along the right wall of the dining room, a small table held a large statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin.

Jose Luis, a stocky young man of about 25, sat against the wall on a low stool that curved upward around his hips. His mahogany face is both innocent and strong, and his long, thick hair hangs to the middle of his back. He has his father's eyes. Segal and I looked like we were San Diegans. Jose Luis looked like a holographic projection from another time and place.

"So, I wanted to ask you, Jose Luis, did you grow up in San Diego?" "No, I grew up in Tijuana. My father staged back and forth, went to medical school." He speaks with a staccato Mexican accent, the same cadence as  Tijuana Spanish.

"Here in the States?"

"In Mexico City, to be a doctor. I basically grew up in Tijuana, and about five years ago I completely moved to San Diego. So I was going, before that, back and forth. I'd spend the week with my mom and weekends with my dad, when he was available, because he was traveling all the time."

"I wanted to ask you how it was growing up as the son of a Toltec nagual."

"It was very magical. Magic happened all around us all the time. For example, coming from school, my grandma grabbed an egg and a glass of water. And when she breaks that, she does an egg reading. She reads your life, so whatever you do, it appeared there. There was nothing I could hide. My grandmother always says, 'Come here!' I'm always hiding from the egg.

"When I *Dreamed,* first, I started experiencing, like, fear, 'cause I woke up in the *dream* and my body was paralyzed. I was very aware, because I knew I was *dreaming.* Yet I didn't have control of the *dream."*

"Did your father explain what was happening to you, as you went along?"

"Yes. But many times he left it for me to figure out. He just smiled -looked at me and smiled. When I was like 11 years old we went to Mata Grande. Mata Grande is some mountains, like an hour from here, near Tecate. He did the initiation with my brother and me, my older brother.

"Before we went up there, I had a *dream* that I was coming up there with my father in the high mountains. Then all of a sudden, in the *dream,* he fell, in the mountains. I looked down, and I could see he was unconscious, and I was so scared. So in the *dream,* I started to run, looking for safety. I went to my mother's home. I went, 'Mom, Mom! My father is dead. He fell down the mountain.' And in the *dream,* he came up from the back of the house, and he said, 'No, I was only playing with you.'

"In that moment I woke up. So from that, like a week later, I said, 'Would you take me to Mata Grande?' It was strange for him that I would ask to go to that place. I was so little. He saw it as a sign of power, a sign of power in the Toltec tradition. It's a sign from God. The doors are opening, and it gives you a signal to take action.

"So he took us to Mata Grande, my brother and I, and he gave the initiation. That initiation was very difficult. Very magic happened, and we took a walk in this place of male energy."