‘If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.’

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

And so began my journey with the third set of teachings to which I’d found my way. Although my relationship to the Deer Tribe was close to coming to an end, my relationship with Gabrielle was deepening. But however deeply I danced, once I stopped, my mind and its incessant commentary were right there waiting for me. I needed to find a disciplined and integrated way of working with my mind and updating the self-concepts and stories I was unconsciously repeating. So Victor’s teaching landed in my life at exactly the right time. I began an intensive period of study with him that was to last for three years.

Learning about my feelings in therapy with Manas and about a more feminine approach to life with Gabrielle had supported me in engaging the body and feeling the ground under my feet. And as I grounded myself in the reality that being an honorary feminist was a story that had no future for me, I started to find a new level of discipline.

The morning after the fire ceremony, we met outside on the lawn. Victor explained to us that for years he’d met people who were using sorcery as a way to escape the challenges of being human. He laughed about all the young folk he’d met who were desperately trying to find their Don Juan and escape into the magical worlds that Castaneda had described so beautifully. With some embarrassment, I recognized myself in what he was saying. I had to admit that I did spend a lot of time dreaming of meeting my allies and of exotic ceremonies with medicines that would blow my mind and open me to the mysteries that would finally make sense of my life.

Victor described the next exercise, which was known as ‘Kicks to the Ego’. We were to line up and place our hands on the shoulders of the person in front of us. We were going to walk forwards and give our full attention to placing our feet in the footsteps of the person in front of us. We would be walking like this for a while and we were asked to listen to the sounds of nature around us as we did so.

Victor’s assistant led the line and off we went. We walked like this for a good half an hour and I was amazed how much sharper all my senses became. Even though I was only looking at the footsteps in front of me, I felt I could ‘see’ nature much more clearly than ever before. It was such a pleasurable feeling that it was easy to maintain focus. I felt that I could have stayed in that state for a long time, but I also knew that ‘kicks to the ego’ wasn’t likely to be focusing on supporting my bliss habit.

As we continued, Victor and his assistant started to speak. ‘You all want to jump into the magical world, don’t you?’ they said. ‘You want to climb out of this mundane place and experience the magic of the allies. You want visions, don’t you? You want to leave this world behind you and travel to the sorcerer’s reality, the second attention. You want to meet Carlos’ teachers up there in the branches, don’t you? Don Juan and Don Genaro, they’re waiting for you up there in the trees.’

They were laughing now and they continued their litany of invitations to leave this world behind and join the sorcerer’s world.

As they spoke, the strangest thing started to happen inside me. I could feel their humour and I could feel the sharp edge inside it. I sensed they were playing with something behind my everyday awareness. I began to feel as if I was split in two. Half of me was totally present in the footsteps of the person in front of me. The other half was listening with a growing sense of unease and irritation to the loud voices of these strange men from Mexico.

And then their tack shifted. They told us to slow down and to repeat every statement they made, and then, as we were doing so, to kick the backside of the person in front of us.

‘Don’t hurt them, but don’t tickle them either.’

And so it began, a fluid litany of insults and scorn, which we all repeated while both giving and receiving a sharp kick.

‘You are children, lost in fantasies you’ve read in a book, pathetic little children running away from all your fears. You want to live in a fairy tale. You want to fly and you haven’t even learned to walk. Wake up, children! It’s time to grow up! Open your eyes and see the illusions you’ve been spinning.’

My mind went into hyper-drive. Am I really paying these lunatics to insult me and am I really agreeing to kick the guy in front of me and be kicked by this bastard behind me?

‘You are gutless. You are without courage. You are cowards. You are lazy. You are a bunch of good-for-nothing space cadets who want to run away from your responsibilities as human beings. The Earth is calling to you and all you do is ignore her and run to the stars. Pathetic! Gutless! Cowards!’

My emotions were all over the place. I felt fury, self-pity and astonishment in equal proportions. I wanted to lash out and defend myself. I wanted to justify myself. I wanted to prove to these idiots that while this might be true of some of the people in our line, it wasn’t true of me! And on top of all that, I was getting a sore ass.

And then it stopped. Suddenly there was silence again.

I was breathless and my eyes were stinging with thick tears of anger and shame.

Then Victor and his assistant told us to stop moving and to lie down on the grass and listen.

I heard two soundtracks simultaneously. The first was the ongoing and repetitive internal dialogue of self-defence and justification. The second, sweet, strong and ancient as the Earth, was the sound of nature around me. When I gave my attention to that music, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard it before, at least not in this way. The birdsong, the leaves moving in the wind and the sheer harmony of nature around me was overwhelming. My heart was bursting with the joy of feeling so connected and the pain of feeling so disconnected. I saw that it was my choice where I placed my attention.

As I gave my focus more and more to the song of nature around me, I suddenly understood. The Mexicans were right. Despite having received this warning on many occasions, I was still running. I still valued a fantastical other world way more than the everyday world. I wanted as many far-out experiences as possible in order to prove to myself and everyone else that magic was real. And all the time I was seeking them out, I was missing the magic that was singing right under my own two feet. I was blind and deaf to the everyday miracle of life that was happening inside me and all around me.

Victor seemed to recognize what was going on for me and seemingly for many others too.

‘Listen to the song of nature,’ he said. ‘Listen to the cacophony inside your head. And make a choice. This is the power of nature. And she is talking to you. She is calling you to be with her. All this seeking other worlds is to ignore the magnificence of the world around you, the world of your senses. The Earth needs you to listen. You are part of her and she is part of you.’

And so we lay there on the ground, listening. Sometimes I was caught up again in the voices inside my head. They were predictable and repetitive. They were like a wall between me and life, defending and justifying a sense of self that had rather rudely been exposed as an imposter.

And then Victor was talking again. He had blindfolds in his hands.

‘Come, friends, it’s time to run in the dark.’

As we joined him, he explained that we were going to do an exercise to place this experience firmly in the deeper intelligence of the body.

We were in a large field. He walked us to one side of it, all the time encouraging us to keep our concentration high. His assistant was standing on the other side.

‘Each one of you,’ Victor told us, ‘one at a time, is going to blindfold yourself and stand with me. Two or three of you are going to join my colleague over there and you are going to chant, “Follow the sound of my voice! Follow the sound of my voice!” The one with the blindfold, your task is to orientate yourself towards where that chant is coming from and then look into the darkness in front of you. I want you to imagine the wall of sound that is your internal dialogue like a group of people standing between you and your true nature. I want you to focus on what may be on the other side of that and when I say “Go”, I want you to run as fast as you can through that wall, following the sound of that chant. When the chant ends and you hear the word “Stop!” you must stop immediately. Your friends who are waiting for you there will welcome you into the new state of being that begins on the other side of that wall.’

I was both afraid and excited and decided to volunteer to run first. With the blindfold on, orientating my body towards the chanting, I crouched low, like a sprinter on the starting line. Victor had his hand on my lower back, helping me to focus and gain as much courage and power as I could.

‘See that wall,’ he said, ‘and see what’s on the other side of it. In between, see those characters, those old ego structures, separating you, giving you false promises about things that only get in the way of what you truly desire. See what you desire on the other side and then run full pelt through that wall.’

I felt supercharged. I don’t think I’d ever felt the raw force of such fierce, wild animal power inside me. I knew that I was standing on a precipice of change. If I could find the courage to run through the walls in my mind, I would be making the choice to develop more awareness of the ways in which my mind chatter was separating me from the world around me.

As I crouched there, I felt fear, like electricity, shooting through the soles of my feet. My heart was beating faster and faster and I could hear it pounding in my ears. Then I felt a push in my lower back as Victor yelled, ‘Go!’

All at once I was running in the dark. I could feel the ground under my feet, the soft springy earth holding me. The air was cool on my face. I ran harder than I ever had before. I could see the shadows of my mind in front of me. They were shaped like wraiths, and as I ran through them, I saw a beautifully carved wooden door. The chant of my companions guided me to it, and as I ran straight through it, I felt a jolt of energy, like lightning, flash through me. Lightning again. I’d felt that twice before.

When I was 11 years old, the rabbi in my community, a wise and kind man called Michael Alony, had encouraged me to take on my ancestral heritage. I’d been born into the tribe of high priests. On the high holy days, the high priests have a ritual to perform as they offer themselves as channels for the Creator’s blessing for the community. As a younger child, I’d loved watching this ancient theatre (even though I wasn’t supposed to) as the men ascended the steps in front of the ark, placed their prayer shawls over their heads and waited to be called into service. Now the rabbi wanted me to do the same. He wouldn’t accept the excuse that as a young boy, my mind was far from holy. And so I acquiesced to his request, even though my father, uncle and grandfather didn’t.

I remember how nervous I was in the synagogue as the time for the ritual approached. I wanted to hide, but I’d made my promise to the rabbi. There was only two of us, me and an old man. We had our hands washed for us and then ascended the marble steps of the ark, turned our backs on the congregation and placed our prayer shawls over our heads. I’d memorized the prayer in Hebrew that we were to say once we were called to turn around with our hands spread and our arms stretched out under our prayer shawls towards the congregation.

As the call came from the chazzan, the singer who was leading the service, something inside me just took over. My body turned, seemingly of its own accord, and the words came out of my mouth as if someone else was singing them. And then a bolt of energy hit me through the top of my head. I felt as if I’d been lit up and slammed into the ground at the same time. Momentarily, I felt huge. I saw a bright light behind my closed eyes and I felt a force of love coming through me that was totally overwhelming. I could have collapsed, but instead I felt strangely held.

Once it was over, I returned to my seat, shaking and shocked. The rabbi smiled at me and I knew something in me had changed forever.

The second time I was hit by lightning, it was a physical reality. I was 22 years old and playing golf with a friend on a municipal golf course in East London, where I was living. At some point we saw an early summer storm coming. Without thinking, I got out my metal-tipped golf umbrella, put it up and stood holding it. My friend joined me under it.

The rain came down and the thunder rumbled. The next thing I knew, my friend had been thrown away from me and was on the ground a few feet away. And I felt exactly the same feeling I’d felt as a boy doing my first priestly blessing. I was electrified and my heart felt as if it was shining out like a lighthouse across the darkened golf course.

I realized with a shock that the metal tip of the umbrella had been hit by lightning and that it had passed right through me. I was shaking, yet strangely elated. I checked myself for burns, but the reality was that I felt fantastic and strong. I’d been given a gift. I’d survived a lightning strike. Death had paid me a visit and left his calling card.

Afterwards, as many people who have had a close encounter with death will testify, the simple things in life seemed that much more important. I also had a sense of urgency. I recognized, in a way that was equally frightening and thrilling, that death could come at any moment.

There are moments in life when the constant tick-tock of time passing in an orderly fashion dissolves momentarily, to be replaced by a much more circular and multi-layered sense of time. Those last seconds of running in the dark were like that.

After bursting through the door, I ran towards the voices of my companions. They were calling me to them, but time warped and shifted on its axis and I found myself in one of those moments where everything around me was moving very fast but I seemed to be entirely still. In everyday reality, I didn’t have more than a second or two at most left to run, and yet in the world I was in, darkness had been replaced by a hazy brightness. It was as if my eyes had been closed and now they were open.

I could see a group of people from different ethnic backgrounds and cultures and they were welcoming me. I saw their faces, and though I didn’t know them, I recognized them instantly. Some of the elders from the Portuguese dream were there. My own ancestors were there. And a group of other beings, some human and some more animal, and I knew them as my allies. The warmth and support I felt from them all was tangible and moved me deeply. I wanted to stop right there and be with them, to talk with them, to know them. I could also see the Earth beneath me and she was alive and conscious. I wanted to lay my heart next to hers and let go.

But the moment dissolved as quickly as it had formed. I heard the voices of my companions in the ‘real’ world shouting ‘Stop!’ and I knew I’d reached the end.

Time rushed back in and I was suddenly being welcomed by my incarnate companions with strong hands and pats on the back. My eyes were crying, partly from the sudden rush of sunlight when the blindfold was removed and partly from the intense emotions of the moment. I was back in the physical world, but a part of me wanted to step back into that hazy bright world I’d visited for a moment. I felt sad and yet elated too. I knew with absolute certainty that I was home. I didn’t have to go anywhere. My allies and my ancestors were with me. The Earth was alive beneath me. Most importantly, I’d made a choice.

Castaneda’s stories described a life lived with a sole purpose: to die consciously and bring one’s awareness intact into the next great adventure beyond the gates of death. I have great admiration for the discipline, art and sheer crazy wisdom displayed so dramatically by his teachers Don Juan and Don Genaro. The truth they shared rang like an ancient bell inside me: sorcery invites us to leave the ordinary world behind.

Conversely, all the shamans I knew were family people who engaged with the day-to-day world. Gabrielle was very supportive of the family path and of the part of Susannah and me that wished to become parents. She was very clear. If we wanted to engage deeply in spiritual practice, becoming parents was going to offer the best ground she knew for checking out just how real our realizations on the dance floor were. Having a child, she assured us, would be like inviting a Zen master to come and live in our house.

I sat down quietly. All that I had seen still felt present around me and I spoke to my ancestors, my allies and my guides. I told them in a whisper that I wished to know them more. I told them that I felt inspired by the strength and dignity I’d seen within them and I hoped to do them proud. And I told them about the choice I’d made.

In that darkness I’d run through, I’d caught sight of a child. Maybe I’d seen our future child. I’d definitely known that mine was the path of family, of relationship, of finding the way to live from this new awareness and direct experience of the Earth as a living being. I’d fallen in love with life and I felt such a desire to honour and protect what I loved.

It was clear to me that I needed to let the sorcerer’s world go. I wasn’t on the sorcerer’s path. I was on the shaman’s path and I’d just run at full speed through the shaman’s door.