The Wheel Of Time

Commentary

The Fire from Within as a book was another of the end results of the influence of Florinda Matus on my life. She guided me to focus this time on don Juan's teacher, the nagual Julian. Both Florinda and my detailed focusing on the man revealed to me that the nagual Julian Osorio had been an actor of some merit – but more than an actor, he had been a licentious man, concerned exclusively with the seduction of women, women of any kind with whom he came in contact during his theatrical presentations. He was so extremely licentious that ultimately, his health failed, and he became infected with tuberculosis.

His teacher, the nagual Elias, found him one afternoon in an open field on the outskirts of the city of Durango, seducing the daughter of a wealthy landowner. Due to the exertion, the actor began to hemorrhage, and the hemorrhage became so heavy that he was on the brink of dying. Florinda said that the nagual Elias saw that there was no way for him to help him. To cure the actor was an impossibility, and the only thing that he could do as a nagual was to arrest the bleeding, which he did. He saw fit to make then a proposition to the actor.

"I'm leaving at five in the morning for the mountains," he said. "Be at the entrance of the town. Don't fail. If you fail to come, you will die, sooner than you think. Your only recourse is to go with me. I'll never be able to cure you, but I will be able to deviate your inexorable walk to the abyss that marks the end of life. All of us human beings go inexorably into that abyss sooner or later. I will head you off to walk the enormous extent of that crack, either to the left or to the right of it. As long as you don't fall, you will live. You'll never be well, but you'll live."

The nagual Elias didn't have great expectations about the actor, who was lazy, slovenly, self-indulgent, perhaps even a coward. He was quite surprised when the next day at five in the morning he found the actor waiting for him at the edge of the town. He took him to the mountains, and in time, the actor became the nagual Julian – a tubercular man who was never cured, but who lived to be perhaps one hundred and seven years old, always walking along the edge of the abyss.

"Of course, it is of supreme importance to you," Florinda said to me once, "that you examine the walk of the nagual Julian along the edge of the abyss. The nagual Juan Matus didn't care to know anything about it. To him, all of that was superfluous. You're not as talented as the nagual Juan Matus. Nothing can be superfluous for you, as a warrior. You must allow the thoughts, the feelings, the ideas of the shamans of ancient Mexico to come to you freely."

Florinda was right. I don't have the splendor of the nagual Juan Matus. Just as she had said, nothing could be superfluous to me. I needed every prop, every twist. I could not afford to bypass any of the views or ideas of the shamans of ancient Mexico, no matter how far-fetched they might have seemed to me.

To examine the walk of the nagual Julian on the edge of the abyss meant that the ability to focus my recollection could be extended to the feelings that the nagual Julian had about his most extraordinary struggle to remain alive. I was shocked to the marrow of my bones to find out that the struggle of that man was a second-to-second fight, with his terrifying habits of indulging and his extraordinary sensuality pitted against his rigid adherence to survival. His fight was not sporadic; it was a most sustained, disciplined struggle to remain balanced. Walking on the edge of the abyss meant the battle of a warrior enhanced to such a degree that every second counted. One single moment of weakness would have thrown the nagual Julian into that abyss.

However, if he kept his view, his emphasis, his concern focused on what Florinda called the edge of the abyss, the pressure eased. Whatever he was viewing was not as desperate as what he was viewing when his old habits began to take hold of him. It seemed to me that when I looked at the nagual Julian at those moments, I was recapitulating a different man; a man more peaceful, more detached, more collected.