An Enlightenment Interview with
Victor Sanchez -- Part II

To Contents (Parts I & II)

To Part I of the Victor Sanchez Interview

E.com: Can you take the Toltecs' teachings and understandings which are so based in nature -- you say in your new book that the thing you respect most about them is their connection with nature -- and bring that to people here, in hotel rooms, in the United States? Can urban people really get what the Toltecs are doing, or do they have to have their own kind of urban ...

Sanchez: I'm not only sure that I -- that we -- can do this, I would go further. I'm sure that that's what we need to do.

We're living in cities, getting so involved in the problems that we watch on TV, and TV tells us all the time what life is, what we should be worrying about, and what kinds of things we should be looking for. TV is telling us what life is while we are sitting here in big buildings. But nature is bigger than that. Nature is always ruling.

It is said that all the things in the universe are fields of energy, but there are five fields of energy which are the biggest ones and rule the realm in which we live. They are the sun, the air, the wind, the water, and the fire. Although they are ruling, we can try to ignore them. That's what human beings have been trying to do for their entire history. Ignore them, and pretend to be the rulers of the world. We are pretending to rule the universe, to conquer nature, but how close are we to really ruling the universe? In the end, it's nature, it's the universe, it's the sun, it's the earth, who decide what's going to happen.

All of our pretensions and assumptions about human beings being the controllers, the king of creation, are going to be nothing. The same thing is going to happen at the level of human society as happens at the level of the individual. You can be the president of a big company, of Coca Cola, or you can be Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan or whoever you like. You can be any of these things, but aren't you going to die the same as more simple people?

What's going to be the difference? Your money's going to give you five more minutes of life? What's going to be the difference? I mean, we pretend that death is not around, we even want to think that there is going to be something more beyond, and say "OK, finally we're not going to die." But we're going to die.

E.com: The ego definitely dies.

Sanchez: And because of that, because death is around all the time, we use it as an advisor: it's telling us, "You're not that big my friend. You're just a being who is going to die and you better enjoy your life now, you better take your responsibility now, and live 100%, because this is your only chance in eternity."

The connection with nature has full meaning for people living in cities because cities are not isolated. A friend was talking with some of the people who were going with me to a workshop near Mexico City. After the workshop he was talking about the fact that he was surprised because people were complaining that their parents didn't love them enough. People were sharing about their experiences in life and several of them were talking about suffering for many years because their parents didn't love them enough.

And he said to them, "I can't understand what you say. You are very sad because your parent didn't love you enough. What can I say? I didn't know my father. When I was born there was no father there, and I lived like that. But I don't feel sad, because my father is with me, can you see that? It is the sun. The sun is with me wherever I go."

Where can you go that the sun is not going to be present? If you are in the city, there is the pavement, but what's beyond that, what's under the pavement? It's our mother, the earth. It's always there.

And so they said to my friend, "You can't start fires as they do in the mountains, or the desert, to be in the company of the grandfather fire? So what do you do? Don't you feel alone in the city?"

He said, "No, don't you have stoves? There's no fire there? Don't you have bulbs? What do you think that light is? What do you think the power and the light inside an engine is? Do you have cars? What's making the engine move? It's the power of my Grandfather Fire."

The big Powers are in all places. If we want to see them we will not be alone. That's why I can come to the city and feel perfectly comfortable and in close connection with them. It's not a problem if you live in the city or if you live in the mountains. It's a problem whether you pay attention or not.

This experience of being connected with the big Powers of the world may sound strange. But if you start talking to the fire little by little -- at the beginning you are not going to be sure if you are hearing real words from the fire -- but little by little you are going to hear little words, and then if you continue looking for this friendship you are going to start hearing big words, which are going to change your life. That's the way it happens. You can start from the place you are, here in the city. That's the way we have been doing it.

E.com: Have you heard of neo-pagans, people who are going back to their tribal roots and practicing earth-based spirituality, who "call in" the directions, and use fire, water, etc.? I think you would like them; there are good things going on that you might not know about.

Sanchez: I have had some connections with these people in different countries, especially in England. England is a special place in Europe in the sense that it is easier for people to connect with the traditions that have roots to the land. In the older traditions the connection with the land, with nature, was something that was very present. So it's not that difficult for them to connect.

Sanchez: This question takes us to a very important point: should we become indigenous people? Should we follow the Toltec way? Is the Toltec way the only way to make this kind of quest for freedom? People frequently ask me about this.

I say, "Of course not. Freedom and knowledge are available for everyone wherever they are. If you are really committed to finding your own path, you are going to use whatever you have at hand."

Let's talk about us. We have taken and learned some practices from the indigenous people. Is that enough? Are we following the Toltec indigenous practices just like that? The answer is "no." That's just half of the tradition. Tradition is not a body of beliefs, it's a body of practices.

We can borrow some practices from other people, because our problem in modern society is we have lost our traditions, lost those practices which could be useful in recovering the connection with the Great Spirit and with the rest of the Powers, with the rest of the fields of energy around us. We are isolated and separated from everything, from other people, from our relatives. We can be sleeping with a person for thirty years and remain separated from that person.

So we have no traditions. Traditions are the practices that people do to get back to the lost unity with the great Spirit, to go back to that thing that we knew when we were in the womb, really united with everything. The Toltec warrior lives in that kind of state, in close and intimate connection with the entire universe.

That's why Toltec warriors can't damage other people, because they know that to damage anything or to damage anybody is to damage yourself, and there's no way to heal yourself without healing others. There's no way to help yourself without helping others

These practices that we undertake to have this experience of communion with the Great Spirit can, in the beginning, be enough to start, but that tradition is only half of the tradition. We should add in our own part, we should create our own ways. We can use part of what the Toltecs have been doing. We can learn from them. But the incredible thing about this is that the tradition is not taught by a person, it is taught by the Powers themselves.

I spent years and years expecting to see when some kind of master, someone in the indigenous community, was going to teach his children, or the beginners, to perform the tradition. I spent years expecting to see this, because what they do in the pilgrimages and the rituals is so complex that I was wondered, "How can I learn this? It's too much." I was expecting there would be some kind of teachers.

Years later I discovered that there is nothing like that. You learn by yourself, you teach yourself. So if you approach a Power using a procedure that we have learned from the indigenous people, if you approach the fire, and you make an offering, and then you accomplish your offering, then the Power is going to take the next step. The tradition you are going to develop and found for your own life and own people is going to be taught by the Power itself.

E.com. Appropriate to where you live and what your life is like.

Sanchez: Sure. We need to create our own ways in communion with the fields of energy which can guide us, as the Grandfather Fire does, for instance. I know that for people who are not familiar with this it can sound like something very abstract, but for people who practice this kind of thing, something very, very, specific and concrete happens.

That's why you are not seeing me dressed like an indigenous person. I am not trying to be an indigenous person. No, I'm living my life, and the traditions we develop allow us to find and develop ways of having similar experiences to what the indigenous people have in their own world as they connect with the spirits.

E.com: What about new technologies that are happening, like the internet, for example? Have you thought about ways of getting your material out through the internet?

Sanchez: Sure, we have a website and the internet has been very useful for us. The internet has something that is very powerful, which is communication, putting people into contact with people. And when people get in contact with people they can get together to do beautiful things, or they can get together to do stupid things. It's a powerful tool. It has given us the chance to let people know what we are doing, and we have people working with our proposals in several different countries, including Russia, Chile, Finland, and South America.

E.com: A lot of your work seems to be original. When you speak or write, in addition to Castaneda, many other spiritual teachers and traditions come to mind, everything from Buddhism (saving all sentient beings) and Gurdjief (how everyone is asleep all the time and we have very little choice), to SETH, the channeled New Age entity (the point of power is now, and you are creating your own reality, which is similar in some ways to manipulating the assemblage point), to William James, the great American psychologist, who talked about how there is an incredible amount of "stuff" out there (a "boomin' buzzin' confusion" which our brain is designed to filter down to a teeny-tiny bandwidth so that we can live in the ordinary world). So, it seems that there are bits and pieces of all of these and more in what you're doing, but you don't seem to rely on or mention any of them. Have you studied them, or are you familiar with them, or are they just not that important?

Sanchez: I like this question because what we do doesn't come from books, it doesn't come from workshops, it doesn't come from the study of eastern philosophies or anything like that. What we do comes from the mountains. There's a different quality because of that.

I gave a talk yesterday and the people were asking me such sophisticated questions about the connections between some Chinese concepts and whatever, and I said, "excuse me, I'm ignorant, I'm not good at doing this."

I have been sharing this practice and we have found incredible results which I can not explain to you at all. I can invite you to share it, and then if you want to make explanations after that, do it. But what happens to us is that we are so involved in action and we are so involved in doing the things ...

There is something different in what we are doing. If somebody would ask me what the big difference between our ways, coming from the mountains, and the rest of them, I'd say it is that the emphasis in the others is on the mind. Western culture, modern culture, has for almost 5000 years been so focused on the rational mind that, after Aristotle and Descartes, we put the rational mind at the top of human experience, like it's the most important thing.

If we want to live in the rational mind, allow it to rule, then the other side, the silent knowledge, is not going to be there. So knowledge from the rational mind takes us to a place of no balance at all. If you try to rule your life by just thinking and thinking, you are going to finish in the couch of a psychoanalyst, for years and years talking and thinking about your life, but you are not going to change.

In opposition to that, what we do is action. We do things with our bodies. We do things with part of ourselves that we don't even know exist. The rational mind takes just a little part of the whole process. Even when people are going for meditation, are going for spiritual philosophy, that's all with the mind ruling everything.

That's one of the things that I didn't like at the end of the works of Carlos Castaneda. They become abstract, so intellectual, such complex and sophisticated explanations about everything ... but what if you close the pages? What if you shut up? What if you don't explain this and that? What do you have? What remains there? We can create incredible castles of words, but what happens when the silence comes? What experience remains?

That's why the programs we have developed over the twenty years we have been doing this kind of work are programs where people are doing things, and the really incredible experiences that change and improve peoples' lives take place in silence. I'm not talking about the fact that people are not actually talking, I'm talking about the fact that there is an experience which is called the silent knowledge, and when you really grasp something which you are really needing to heal in your life, it comes from the silence.

You don't need explanations for that. How many of those people, how many of those big masters, are going to be able to do their thing without words, without explanations? That's the way that people in the mountains work. They don't explain things. They just do it. So for me that's the one very special quality, and that's a faster and clearer way to learn.

Sanchez: The other big difference is that in this knowledge, you don't get to freedom alone. Sometimes we get to the point where we think about liberating ourselves, improving our personal growth, and this kind of process is always perceived at the human level. Even psychology is so centered in the mind, in the individual. What happens in the mountains is the opposite. Everything is a process where all the Powers are participating.

Whatever is happening to you is in connection with them, is in connection with the other people. They greet each other saying, "You are my other self." So whatever happens to you and the experience you are sharing is part of my own process. You can try to improve yourself and you can actually do that, but not many people get to the level where they have the entire universe participate in what they're doing.

It's like doing your job. You can be doing your job just for money, or you want to give some service to the community, which would be better. But you can be doing your job, and have the Powers participating in it, because you have offered something to the sun. Or maybe you are just helping your father, the sun, put some light into the darkness, whatever darkness you are passing through. So your doings are connected to all those incredible phenomena. An experience like this is completely different. In this kind of experience you are not isolated and just doing the thing by yourself. Everything counts, everything is connected, and you live it that way.

E.com: So, is the sun conscious? Is the sun aware, more aware than we are?

Sanchez: [Laughter] That is difficult to answer. I wouldn't say more aware. It's aware in the way that the sun is aware. But it is absolutely alive.

E.com: And the wind is aware in the way that the wind is aware?

Sanchez: Do you know .... I remember once when an indigenous person called me. He said, "I know you think I'm crazy because I think that the clouds are alive, that the weather is alive. But how couldn't they be alive if they are giving us life? How could they give life without being alive?" He was talking about water, about nature.

E.com: I don't have a problem with that.

Remember when Castaneda said that someone's quality of energy in their life is partially dependent on the act of lovemaking which gives rise to them? What happens when kids are born through in vitro fertilization, essentially having conception starting out in a test tube? What about the level of energy of a person who is born that way as opposed to a person who is conceived during passionate love making?

Sanchez: I have no idea. In the long term there are going to be results that can be witnessed or even measured. There will be generations of people who are born that way and perhaps that experience will give us a response, but I have no idea.

E.com: Any final words about seeking freedom and saving energy?

Sanchez: There are two things about saving energy. In order to save energy the best thing you can do is to find ways to move away from self-importance. You need to learn to be humble. To be humble means you don't lose the vision of your own shit. You can become an author or whatever, you can get lost in whatever you are doing, becoming self-importance, and then you lose track, you lose what you are looking for.

The only way to be really be able to continue is to keep the vision of your own shit, because then you can stand in front of all of us and you are going to see that you are just the same as the person in front of you. You are not bigger than that, and this kind of awareness, being able to remember your own shit and feel relaxed about it, takes a lot of energy, instead of trying to play the big guy.

To tell the truth also saves a lot of energy. To lie is more energy wasting.

E.com: Tell the truth, stay humble, use death as your advisor ...

Sanchez: Yes. Freedom is the first and ultimate goal of the Toltec warrior, and that's why a Toltec warrior is not a disciple, that's why a Toltec warrior is not a master, because he is in love with freedom.

Freedom should be something very specific, in a specific moment. If you look for freedom in an abstract way and say "I would like to have total freedom" without having a minimum idea of what that is, then you are going to get nowhere. But if you can see, until you are crying some, and notice that you are having a problem with communicating that you are not able to overcome, and that hurts your life, and you feel that you would really like to be able to connect with someone in a human way, that's your freedom in that moment.

Have the freedom to do what you are needing for your life in that specific moment. That's going to be your task. This is just an instance, it could be any kind of limitation, something which is hurting your life, and you need to overcome it: that's the freedom you are looking for. Once you get there, freedom is going to be something different. You are going to look at the new face of freedom, and you are gong to embrace it, and that's how we move, that's how we walk. Pursuing freedom, and the freedom is always changing in front of our eyes.

E.com: Makes life interesting.

Sanchez: Yes. That's something you can work with, instead of just the abstract expression of freedom, of looking for freedom from living in this world to go where? Why? What's the problem with this world?

E.com: It's pretty good.

Sanchez: Yes, there's so much to be done here. The problem is that when people get hooked to these kinds of abstract ideas about freedom, knowledge, and similar things, they are pursuing something that they don't know anything about, and they remain in the same place. They are stuck in just thinking about it, but not doing anything about it. So, let's come back to the earth and let's face life as it is.

E.com: Thank you very much for your wisdom and time.

Sanchez: You're very welcome.