Balance


I don't remember when I first began to think about balance as an alternative to meaning, but I know it was beginning to penetrate my understanding when I was reading Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan kept telling Carlos that the key was energy. You get energy or you lose it. You have extra and can store some, or you are always using up everything.

The underlying difference between a sorcerer and an ordinary man, he said, was that a sorcerer stores energy by discovering where it is going out unnecessarily. The place where it is wasted, the sorcerer "sees," is in self-importance. By doing away with self-importance, the sorcerer in effect shuts off energy used exclusively in involvement with one's pictures of oneself. This energy is stored, and once there is enough, things start to happen.

What happens or how it happens isn't known in advance. This is why there is a great deal of fear involved with the initial stages of becoming a sorcerer. To the self-importance, it involves letting go of control, which is actually an illusion of control caused by being inside a pattern. Because a pattern is predictable, if one is identified with it, the past and future are not any particular mystery.

Brugh Joy used to try to explain this to people by having them imagine a person in a dark closet, exploring all the parameters of their enclosure, and thinking it's the whole thing. If they could find the door and open it, they would realize how limited their pattern really is.

Don Juan explained it to Carlos by giving him an example of the tonal and the nagual, or, the right side and left side development. They were sitting in a cafe in a small town in Mexico, as I recall it. "What is the tonal?" Carlos asked him.

Don Juan said (this is from memory and not a quote from the book) You see this table? Everything you have a word for is on the table, and the table is the tonal. You see all the other tables, and they look a lot alike. This table is the tonal of your time.

So Carlos begins to question whether everything for which there is a word is in the realm of the tonal. He asks about love, and Don Juan points out the sugar bowl. He asks about God, and Don Juan says, God is the tablecloth. And finally Carlos asks, well, what is the nagual? Don Juan gestures with his arm, and says, "The nagual is everything that is not on the table."

The cultural consciousness is carved, rather arbitrarily, from the collective psyche. It is the first education, wherein there is a word for everything and everything is in its word. But at some point one recognizes the unconsciousness in this arbitrary structure. That is why Ashley Montagu said that you can't become educated until you overcome your education.

The idea of balance took a long time to replace the search for meaning, because I would always look for meaning in it. I had no other concept of understanding than that of looking for meaning. The more plausible reality is that the conscious mind, or right hand, thinks inductively. It moves outward from that which is irreducible, into increasingly complex metaphorical constructions. (Julian Jaynes postulates that contemporary consciousness is based entirely on metaphor.)

The left side consciousness does not move outward into metaphorical construction. It moves inward, toward what can't be divided because it is materialized, and thus it has no other possibilities than what it has become. There is no metaphorical extrapolation outward toward meaning. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The teachings for development of the left side begin with stopping the internal dialogue, or monkey mind, or whatever you want to call it. The way to stop it is to deprive it of self-importance, Don Juan says. There are a lot of ways to say it but the key is knowing that so long as you deal in words, you're in the tonal. In the nagual there is no time for reflection because there is only the eternal present. Linear time doesn't exist, in other words.

When I discovered the left side I began to devalue the right, because the realm of the body was the realm of nature, of direct communication, of oneness with others, and of sensuality so good it just had to be wrong. Like the song of the sirens, this passage into the body was full of seduction. I was tempted to discount the value of the right side. The power of the Great Mother takes you by surprise if you've been living in an upstairs flat with the Sun God.

Remember in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou," where the boys hear the sirens sing and they get drunk, and Pete ends up in jail? Everett and Delmar end up being robbed and beaten by the Cyclops, old one-eyed Dan. The song the sirens sing is, "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby."


Strap yourself to the mast and put wax in your ears, or you'll be served on the rocks with a twist.

"Hey, piano man, sing, 'My Way.'"

"I don't know 'My Way.'"

"How about Lost in the Woods, then?"

"You mean Out in the Woods, by Leon Russell? "

"Yea. Sing that one."

Well I’m going down, going down a hard road.
Just don’t know, don’t know where I’ve been.
But I think I’ve been walking, I’ve been walking round in circles,
can’t even find a friend.
Whoa my love, my love she is not waiting.
Think I might have been gone, I’ve been gone too long
Look at the people, people make me crazy
I can hardly sing my song
Hustlers stand around me, I’m lost and all alone.
Can’t tell the bad from the good,
I’m lost in the woods; I’m lost in the woods.
Big city gamblers, gamblers take my money.
Yes it gets to be useless, yes it’s useless to me.
And I think I’m lost when I’m lost inside this jungle
Can’t see the forest for the trees
Well pretty little woman come and get me
Try me, try me one more time.
Yes and your sweet, your sweet understanding,  
can’t fix this broken heart of mine.
The vultures fly around me,
come and take me home,
can’t tell the bad from the good,
I'm out in the woods, I'm lost in the woods....
I'm a man gone crazy in the woods.

On the other side of the search is the realization that you really ain't going nowhere, regardless of how many stories you're pumped full of about the hot virgins of heaven, or being sucked up by a celestial vacuum cleaner, leaving behind the dirt clods who didn't drink the magic Kool Aid.

The advantage of this realization is that you begin to stop interfering in other people's business, because you're too busy trying to stay in the center, relating the opposites. You are east of Eden, and you know what's above and you know what's below.

Above is the sky. Hopefully there's not a high wind, because below you is a gorge at the bottom of an abyss. And you are walking a tightrope, your only advantage a balance bar and the ability to put your brain in the service of your feet, and your feet in the service of your brain.





Posted: Thu - December 21, 2006 at 01:20 PM