The Master

 

There is a tendency, born of this consumer society, to put a price on everything, automatically assigning it a value that is in no way real. That value is nothing more than a reflection of the effort one has to make to obtain the coveted object. For some, that effort will be infinite, making the object unattainable and the desire to obtain it a source of desperate anguish; for others, it will be minimal, turning the object into something commonplace, barely desirable, whose only value is the envy it arouses in those belonging to the first group.

Conditioned by the habit of this experience, we have come to believe that when something does not have a price tag hanging from it, it cannot have any value. And so, following on from the subject that is presumably the focus of this section, if one wishes to embark on a new field of knowledge or discipline, one will look for a master and judge his worth according to the price tag hanging from wherever he has chosen to hang it. That price, combined with the appropriate guarantees of quality — years spent in retreat at some distant monastery, Olympic achievements, and so on — and with the right image projected by the master, will imprint upon our badly conditioned brains a feeling of satisfaction, self-assurance, and even a certain degree of pride at having found, amid the overwhelming chaos of supply and demand, the best option available.

Luo Chan, my master, had a different opinion on the matter. He used to say that anyone could be a master. The only requirement was that it had to be someone you admired, someone you wanted to be like. It could be someone close to you or someone far away, someone from the past or someone who emerged from a novel, a child, an old person, an animal… He did say that the closer the person was to you, the faster the learning process would be, but he did not consider it an indispensable condition.

Once you have chosen your master, the task is to regard everything he or she does as a special lesson for you — hence the importance of closeness. He also used to say that if you have two instead of one, so much the better; and that, after a while, everyone will begin to appear to you as a master, walking through the world with the sole purpose of teaching you and making you a better person.

Sit Down and Breathe

First, he told me to sit on a cushion on the floor. “Get comfortable and cross your legs,” he said. He sat down in an old armchair in the corner. He must have read my face, because he immediately said, “Relax. Don’t expect anything… just breathe.”

A while passed, and then he began to speak:

“Nothing can come from nothing, so if something exists, it has always been there.”

“If something exists and has always been there, it means that it is eternal (in time) and infinite (in space).”

“If it is not eternal or infinite, it does not exist in itself; therefore, it is not real. But the fact that it is not real does not mean that it does not exist. It means that it does not exist in itself.”

“The things we perceive do not exist because they are nothing in themselves. They are simply at one of their stages within a continuous process of change. They do not come from nothing — nothing can come from nothing. They come from a single substance that is in continuous transformation.”

“Only that single substance truly exists in itself.”

At this point, I tried to say something, but he wouldn’t let me.

“Relax and breathe,” he insisted. “And focus on that one substance.”

After what felt like a quarter of a century, he told me to stand up. He had placed a laptop in front of me.

“Stay relaxed, keep breathing, stay focused, and do whatever the guy in red does.”

When I finished the exercise, I sat back down on the cushion. After another quarter of a century had passed, he sent me home.

That’s how my first day went, and the second, and the third… and it continued like that for a month, often twice a day. By the end of the month, I was a different person.

Today, five years later, not a day goes by that I don’t remember that man, and not two go by without my reliving some of those movements, forever etched in my memory.

Things continued as I have described. The monologues I had while meditating before training gradually transformed into conversations, thanks to the various readings he recommended — that powerful absorption that Eastern wisdom possesses once you begin to understand it. Most of these are reflected in the articles that appear in this section.

Then, suddenly, one day he said to me:

“Now that you know how to be still and silent, you have to learn to move.”

And we began working on this movement routine.

From then on, our meetings dwindled to sporadic chats over coffee, during which I tried to shed some light on the hundreds of doubts I had about Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism…

“Relax,” I would tell myself. “It’s all the same. It’s the Great Spirit that is there, where it has always been. The Vedas are the oldest known written representation; afterwards, everyone made their own interpretation of the Whole and put it down in a book, which only demonstrates humanity’s unhealthy tendency to write books in abundance.

“You yourself will end up writing your own vision, you’ll see. It can’t be any other way. But if you see division instead of unity, you’ll never stop finding differences or asking questions. You’ll search through a carefully selected collection of words for an explanation of something that lies beyond the limits of human cognitive capacity, just like a monkey trying to explain the law of gravity.”

The difference is that the monkey doesn’t try to explain anything; it simply moves through the jungle, leaping from branch to branch without touching the ground.

Human beings, on the other hand, cling to things, divide them, subdivide them, apply them to one context or another, adding subtle connotations that carry them in one direction or another, forgetting that the answer to life is in life itself; that the brain is an organ with despotic tendencies that must be kept under control; and, above all, that words are exhausting.

Human beings on this side of the planet urgently need this wisdom, but it is not enough to import it from the East, nor is it enough to adopt one of those unsettling “-isms.” They must discover their own, draw it from their own experience, from their own tragedy…

A few days after saying these words, Lucrecio Chanchangorri, Luo Chan to his friends, left our plane of reality to join the Great Old Father. His body was repatriated and now rests in peace in San Ignacio Río Muerto, in southern Sonora.

The celebrations for his soul lasted four days; the drinking was legendary, in keeping with the purest Yaqui tradition, of which Luo had been one of its most beloved shamans.