The first time Don Juan talked to me at length about magical passes was when he made a derogatory comment about my weight. “You are way too chubby,” he said. “It’s time that you take seriously one of the sorcerers’ greatest findings: the magical passes.”
“Not only have I told you a great deal about magical passes, you know a great number of them already. I have been teaching them to you all along.” He was right in that I was being nasty with him. I had been surprised with a topic that I didn’t expect, but it wasn’t true that he had taught me any magical passes all along. “What I meant to say is that you do imitate everything that I do, so I have been cashing in on your imitation capacity. I have shown you different magical passes, all along, and you have always taken them to be my delight in cracking my joints. I like the way you interpret them: cracking my joints! We are going to keep on referring to them in that manner.”
The magical passes don Juan was referring to, as he himself had said, were ways in which I thought he cracked his joints. The result of these stretching movements, from my point of view, was a succession of cracking sounds which I always thought he was producing for my amazement and amusement.
“Why are they called magical passes?” I asked.
“They are not just called magical passes,” he said, “they are magical!” “They produce an effect that cannot be accounted for by means of ordinary explanations. These movements are not physical exercises or mere postures of the body; they are real attempts at reaching an optimal state of being. The intent of thousands of sorcerers permeates these movements. Executing them, even in a casual way, makes the mind come to a halt.”
“For human beings, there are lines of similarity… lines of things which are similar or strung together by purpose. The strange part for sorcerers is that they see that all these lines of affinity… are associated with man’s idea that things are unchangeable and forever, like the word of God.”
“The sorcerers’ magical passes are magical because in practicing them, the body realizes that everything, instead being an unchangeable string of affinities, is a current, a flux. And if everything in the universe is a flux, a current, that current can be stopped. A dam can be put on it, and thus halt or deviate its flux.”
Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. “Don’t worry about the ants,” don Juan said, reading my thoughts. “You are at this moment charged with an unusual energy, product of your internal dilemmas… And now, to answer your question… I can tell you that it is true that every time we execute a magical pass, we are, indeed, altering the basic structures of our beings.”
I asked don Juan to give me an example of putting a dam on the flow he was talking about. “What you call your mind is not your mind. Sorcerers are convinced that our minds are extraneous things that have been put on each one of us.”
Don Juan said that through their dreaming practices, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered that certain movements fostered further silence, and created a peculiar sensation of plenitude and well-being. They became so enthralled with this feeling that they struggled to repeat it in their hours of vigil. Penuriously, they began to piece together the movements they remembered. They were capable of recreating movements that had seemed to them to be automatic reactions of the body in a state of dreaming. Don Juan said that the result was the magical passes. Encouraged by their success, they were capable of recreating hundreds of movements. The idea was that in dreaming, the movements happened spontaneously, and that there was a force that guided their effect, without the intervention of their volition. In the realm of practicalities, the magical passes were, for those sorcerers of ancient Mexico, genuine avenues for preparing them for their navigation into the unknown. They established a basic criterion for practicing them… That criterion is called saturation, meaning that they bombarded their bodies with a profusion of magical passes, in order to allow the force that binds us together to guide them for maximum overall effect.
(Carlos Castaneda, Silent Knowledge)
