"Male energy?"

"Yes, we were with my stepsister, Kimberly, but it was an initiation for us boys. He left my sister and took us up by ourselves. I remember him saying at that time about male energy. It was all between the three of us. So in the mountains, he put us to see the beauty around. And to see his shadow, because he was behind us. The sun was hitting so you could see his shadow, and all of a sudden, his shadow turned to, like, a serpent form. And all around the mountains you could see rattlesnakes. Lots of noise, high up, rattlesnakes, all round the mountains.

"It was a very powerful personal feeling of having the communication of nature. That was the initiation, which brought many Dreams. So that was a lot of discovery. And I'm learning from that discovery."

"How do you feel about stepping into your father's shoes?"

"Right now, I feel it's so normal, it's a way of life. I get excited. But before, it was a lie to think...you know how a kid always resists what the parents want."

"Your father resisted it as well."

"Yes, he did. In the Dream, many times I can escape and resist. But it came to a point where there was nothing to resist. And so it came to a completely joyful moment. It's about sharing love. When going into that feeling, we realize that we are children of God, so when I teach I don't see color, I just go into heightened love. I put everything in the human form into unconditional love."

"Do you teach these seminars south of the border also?"

"Yes, yes. When I was little, when I was going to junior high school, and in high school, I always had an altar, wherever I lived. For my friends, it was kind of weird to see these things, because in Mexico, normally you have just Catholic and Pentecostal. So they would say, 'What is your father?' I say, 'Oh, he's a nagual.' We were at my grandma's, so they have to listen.

"So at one point, I'm at a party. They come to me and say, 'Okay, you want to show us what you can do, teach us something.' So -- it was very funny -- when I start talking, the noise got lower, lower, and then all my friends, all the people from the party, were in front of me. So I started sharing what my father had been teaching, and my grandmother. To my father and grandmother, it was quite extraordinary. How everyone, with no practice at all on my part, received a message. I was inspired."

"I wanted to talk to Judy for a while. You came into this...how?"

"I met a person who had just been working with Mother Sarita. The feeling of this person's energy -- I had to meet Mother Sarita. In fact, I didn't even want to talk to them. I ran to the phone to call. I said, 'I'd like to come meet you.' There was a workshop coming up in two weeks, so I went and met Miguel and Mother Sarita.

"Very shortly after that, Miguel asked me to start working with him, to teach yoga at his workshop. So I'd been working with him for a year, and I became one of his students, one of his Dream students. I met everyone in Jose's family, and I was traveling around, pretty much everywhere Miguel went. A year later, on the way to New York, to catch a flight to Egypt, I finally met Jose.

"When I met Jose, he was in that point of resistance he shared with you. And when I saw him at the airport in New York with his father, he intimidated me so much. He had these headphones on that were so loud with heavy metal, and on his head was like a gangster hat, and he wore bug-eyed glasses. And this huge shield that said, 'Don't mess with me.' In fact, his character was so good, if you could see the face, he was like this mask. He was the type of fellow that if I saw him on the street, I would have crossed the street.

"And after I got over the shock that Miguel was with this character, it took my breath. I almost didn't want to, but I couldn't not go over and say hi to Miguel. And Miguel said to me, 'This is my son, Jose.' And I'd heard that name forever. So, I pushed up these little bug-eyed glasses, and the moment I saw the eyes, I went, 'Oh, my God! You're the same as your father. I love you. You are my family.'

"I saw him, and I saw his mask and what he was doing, and I saw his beauty. We've been together ever since."

I asked Jose, "Do you have anything that you would like to say, to add on your own, without answering questions?"

He said, "Yes, it was like two years ago, I went to the dentist, and I go home, and when I was coming back, I noticed that my eyes started hurting, hurting in the [contact] lens, and I removed them, because it was hurting in the lens, for hours, in the rain.

"I got to the house. I said, 'Oh, honey, I'm very tired. My eyes hurt very much. I'm going to go to sleep, and tomorrow will be better.' So I went to sleep, and the next day I saw everything blurry. My eyesight was gone. I could just see a little light. It was very scary, because the pressure kept increasing. The pressure in my eyes, and I couldn't see.

"So I went to Tijuana. My family, all my uncles, are doctors. So they took me there. And in the beginning, when I see my aunt -- she's an eye doctor-- she was very scared. And she put light in my eyes and asked me if I could see this. I know there was bad trouble. She was

accidentally showing her fear. "So we went to another doctor, and he said, 'Well, if you're gonna see again, you're gonna see again. At first we thought you might have brain damage.' So, after a while, they put in an IV, and the pressure went away. But I was like that for a week. At first I was feeling bad, feeling scared. But then I see loved ones having more suffering and pain, crying, feeling these things. And I said to myself, 'Wow! I'm the one who's supposed to be like that. I'm here taking care of them, and I'm the blind one.'

"And right there I knew I had a choice, in that moment. I could become the greatest victim, or I could become the greatest warrior in life and accept what God had given me. And in that, I noticed that there's a whole world inside. But I loved to...I like to watch eyes. But when that was taken away, I knew I had to proceed. And I could perceive the whole...it was like the whole infinity inside.

"So one day I wake up and finally start making peace. And accepting, this is the way I'm going to live now. And I go to the mirror, and I see for the first time. I wake up and I see my sideburns -- he first thing I see was my sideburns. I was so happy.

"And I know the gift of God that was given to us, everything, life. So from that experience, it is so amazing, so amazing to see, that we don't need a sign of God to know that he is listening to us. The very moment that we wake up, every morning we open our eyes and take a deep breath, it's a sign of power to know that He is there.

"And from that we receive all gifts, a true love for the Creator, and the creation, that is one. And from that you fall in love more and more with this stuff, and you fall more and more in love with God. And everything starts making more sense, to listen to yourself and see the whole Dream around you. And to see, wherever you put your attention, you will perceive.

"Whenever you go to church and see the altar, you know that's a house of God. You go to Buddhist temple and see the Buddha, you know that's a house of God. And also I know that when I opened my eyes and could see, I know the world is a house of God.

"So going beyond the language and going beyond the way of being is a complete accepting of the way life is. And it's so beautiful, to surrender to that."

In Teotihuacan I set out to write an objective account of how a nagual works, but then a miracle happened to me. Teotihuacan translates, The Place Where Man Becomes God.

It's hard to grasp the enormity of Teotihuacan. Twenty-five hundred years ago it was a city of a quarter million people. But the consciousness that built it was more different from ours than ours is from that of the Martians of old-time space-opera science fiction. It was a society in which science, religion, and art were not separate. The engineering has mystical significance. The stone facades are heavy, ominous, and weird. This city of huge pyramids and giant plazas was conceived by a spiritual, poetic sensibility to induce an altered state of consciousness. One might even say an "altered" state of consciousness. It towers and sprawls and envelops. It overwhelms.

Our first morning, we walked from the hotel, a Club Med, to the ancient city of pyramids, reconstructed stone walls twice as tall as a man, and plazas with immense stone platforms at their centers. The leaders were stunningly beautiful women: Nancy Coleman, from Los Angeles, a mom in her 30s; and Rebecca Haywood, from San Diego,

probably in her late 20s.

The 150 or so of us had been split into groups of 7 or 8. My group included Rosalie Garcia, a San Diego corporate exec; Brian and June Foy, from Australia, who were maybe in their late 50s or early 60s; James Golden, an American SNAG (sensitive, new-age guy) and Leslie Gilbertie, his pretty blond wife, from Northern California; and Carol Brooks, a young Australian woman who lived and worked in London. Brooks was in her early 30s, tall and easygoing, her dark pageboy haircut capped by a black Clint Eastwood hat with a silver-and-turquoise  band.

We headed that morning for the Sea of Hell, a huge stone quadrangle with a grass floor and a stone platform, or island, in the center. Haywood did most of the talking. She had the same gift as Don Miguel. In a low, soft, crooning voice, she led us into a heightened state of consciousness.

We were given 20 minutes to wander in the quadrangle, to drop our emotional baggage. I walked around the edges counterclockwise, to all four corners, marking each with Reiki symbols, enclosing the plaza in my consciousness, the better to discard my accumulated emotional detritus in the middle.

Rosalie Garcia returned to the island crying. Haywood held her from behind and pounded her back in a ritual way that I recognized from the Castaneda books. The couples were crying too. We all talked about our experiences. Talking seemed to make them more real. By the time we left, the two couples were arm in arm, like teenagers in love. Only Brooks and I seemed unmoved. But we weren't. I felt the load of grief and greed, lust and guilt lifted.

Next Haywood and Coleman took us to a pyramid in the quadrangle, the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. Many stone heads of Quetzalcoatl were carved on it. The leaders told us to pick one and stare at it until we entered it. At Teotihuacan we would be symbolically digested by Quetzalcoatl, to emerge in the end in the light of the sun, at the Pyramid of the Sun.

The Avenue of the Dead is the mile and a half long axis of the city. It was here that it hit Brooks. She started screaming. Whatever emotional load she was carrying, whatever demon, it was on the way out, and it did not go peacefully. Coleman led her to stone steps, and Brooks lay in Coleman's arms sobbing. Then, just when you thought it had passed, it started again, gut-wrenching screams from the bottom of her soul. That night, in the hotel bar, Brooks was radiant.

The second day I hooked up with Rosalie Garcia. I wanted to talk to her about her experience the day before. She said her tears were cathartic tears of happiness, and she showed me an entry in her journal that explained how she felt: "What is so agonizing about this kind of work is that -- despite one's willingness to grow and make changes in one's life, it's our own resistance to release, to let go of the familiar distortions (our domestication) of life -- it's our fear of the new and unfamiliar that keeps us stuck in our own stuff."

We stood atop a stone wall that separated two of the stone quadrangles on the Avenue of the Dead, the Pyramid of the Moon straight ahead and the Pyramid of the Sun off to the right. Garcia said, "If this is a dream, it's a keeper."

Later, she reminded me of her favorite Miguel Ruiz quote. "You are given two choices in life: you can be happy or you can be stupid."

Rebecca Haywood led us, there on the steps of that wall, in a ceremony to rectify our relationship with our beloved. Then we were released to wander and ponder in the Place of the Air. She said we were to proceed without judgment but with discernment.

Usually your beloved means your life partner. But a writer has another beloved, his audience. I'm a Vietnam veteran. The audience for my writing has been other Vietnam vets, soldiers, and a few civilians. But I've said everything I have to say about war and soldiering three times over. I had a practical need to graduate to larger issues and a new fan base.

What stood in my way was that I had never come home from Vietnam. The young men who went to Vietnam thought that if we were willing to die for our country, put our very lives on the line, our countrymen would be grateful. And, oh, how wrong we were! We came home to a wall that separated us from the civilians. I've seen that flinch behind the eyes when someone I liked but would never get to know thought, "How many babies has this guy killed?"

The answer is none, but there was no way for them to ask, so I never got to say. I was gun-shy of that hurtful flinch behind the eyes, and to reach an audience, you have to love it, to sing to it in its own language. The worst thing you can do is fear it.

I felt dazed, staggered. I walked to a low wall and sat leaning against it. I thought, Jimmy, you have to love them. Maybe some of them will never get it, but maybe some of them will, that you signed on to protect their lives with yours. My decision to sacrifice myself for America had been an act of love, and the only way to be true to it was to keep loving, whether it was recognized or rewarded or not. And I was crying. Brooks came striding across  the courtyard, black flat-crowned cowboy hat on the back of her head. She sat beside me and held my hand, not saying a word. We sat there a long time. She reached in a pocket and took out a curiously shaped crystal, flat on one end, jagged peaks on the other. She placed it on my heart.  In that moment, I came home.

Everybody there experienced something  cataclysmic. I saw people so entranced that they cried or cried out or shook all over like jackhammers.

The next morning, in my just-before-waking *dreams,* I turned into a falcon, unfurled powerful wings, and pumped them into the sky, then soared to the top of the Pyramid of the Moon, flaring to alight. I stood on stalky bird legs, hopping, looking out at the first line of light as the sun rose and the sky turned pastel blues and lavenders. The east side of the bushes in the plain below became rough gray-green crescents. From the villages around, the smells of smoke and coffee rose from the first fires of the day.

It was a *dream*. But in memory it is more clear and vivid than driving over the bridge to Coronado. It has more meaning.

The closing ceremony was at the top of the Pyramid of the Sun. The climb itself was structured as a ceremony. All 150 of us walked around the pyramid at every level, men clockwise, women counterclockwise. We could see for miles in all directions. By the time we got to the top we were in an altered space.

I felt like an astronaut in orbit around the sun. Then it occurred to me that I really was in orbit around the sun.

On top of the pyramid, we gathered in a group around Jose Luis, who was preaching. Jose Luis is a stem-winder of a preacher, with his baby face and his hair flowing from under a battered fedora to the middle of his back. He believes and feels so deeply that the words just roll out of him.

The sun shone on us, and monarch butterflies fluttered around. One lit on a clip in a blond girl's hair. I couldn't see who she was through the crowd. I thought, that is so cool! It should happen to all of us.

Erika Kalter, a San Diego yoga instructor who had been teaching a free, optional class every morning, stood behind me. She cracked up. She started laughing so hard she bent over and slapped her thigh. I turned and said, "What?" "There's a butterfly on your hat."

I'm at the University of Transformation, which has its campus in a two-story suite in an office park in Sorrento Mesa. I've come to go over some questions I have about my interview with Jose Luis.

There's a meeting tonight of the San Diego Dream group. Don Miguel Ruiz, Jose Luis, and Barbara Emrys, another San Diego shaman, will speak, and then the group will spend the weekend Dreaming. We're upstairs in a large open room with a lot of folding chairs. Not wooden chairs. These are canvas chairs with steel-tube frames, chairs that one can sit in for hours without moving, feet flat on the floor, hands on knees, back straight.

It's an affluent crowd of well-dressed people, mostly but not exclusively Caucasian. I notice that there's no sign of attitude anywhere. There are no macho guys and no wimpy guys. The women are all attractive. Not movie star or model beautiful, necessarily, but beautiful in the way that any woman who is nice and has a sense of self is beautiful.

Along the far wall is a couch with a wire and clip-on microphone on it. Erika Kalter is running the PA system. I go over to greet her and to tell her that I'm still doing most of the yoga she taught me and that Brian Foy took a picture of me and the butterfly on my cap.

Ruiz, Jose Luis, and Emrys enter and sit on the couch. Ruiz clips on the mike. He looks fondly around the room, with his warm smile and liquid eyes, and says, "I am in love, and there is no doubt."

Someone in the back of the room missed that last. He says, "What?"

Ruiz smiles, "I said, 'There is no doubt.'"

- Jim Morris

Jim Morris