DON MIGUEL RUIZ
I was supposed to take the Sahara Exit; only there was no Sahara Exit. I was on I-15 North, rocketing through Las Vegas early on a Sunday morning, having driven from Topanga to Barstow the night before. My mission was to interview a best-selling author and shaman named don Miguel Ruiz, and what the hell was a shaman doing in the American Gomorrah anyway?

Here’s what I knew already. One night in the late 1970s, Don Miguel, then a young Mexican surgeon, fell asleep at the wheel of his car, and crashed it into a concrete retaining wall. He lay near death for some days and had that near-death experience of being out of his body. He saw his body from another vantage point.  But if he saw his body, where was he when he saw it? And if he was not his body, what was he?

The last of thirteen children, don Miguel had grown up in rural Mexico and come from a line of curanderos, shaman healers. His mother, Sarita, was such a healer.  Although she'd taught him as a child, he'd resisted the ancient tradition and become an MD. After the accident, he began to study again with Sarita, and she apprenticed him to a powerful nagual (pronounced no-wall), a sorcerer in the Toltec tradition.

Today don Miguel writes self-help books, teaches seminars, and trains Toltec naguals. His students range from old hippies to academics and professionals who have never before deviated from the approved career path. His work has spread nationwide and worldwide through the popularity of his books, principally The Four Agreements.

I had long been a fan and student of the books of Carlos Castaneda. He popularized Toltec sorcery with a series of twelve books, which he began writing in the late 1960s.  Castaneda's teacher, an old Indian brujo named Don Juan Matus, made his home in a shack, rambled in the desert, and lived a carefully, deliberately anonymous life. Castaneda also stayed out of the public eye.  In contrast, don Miguel has a website (miguelruiz.com) on which he advertises "power journeys" to Teotihuacán in Mexico, to Machu Picchu in Peru, to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, to the Haleakala volcano on Maui. There are links for "wisdom groups" and for "mentors." There is a discussion of something called the Sixth Sun Center. This is about as far as you can get from rambling in the desert with an old Indian sorcerer.

Was this guy just a jumped up tour guide? Was he a con man? Was it possible that he could be both of those things and still be legitimate? Words like “nagual” are ever so slippery. Bottom line, I wasn’t sure if he was real or not, and I was not entirely sure what, in this context, the word “real” meant.

If I could actually interview him, I could test him, explore his mind.
But I had to find him first. I pulled off the freeway, hung a left under it, and pulled back on, going the other way, heading for the south part of Vegas, dodging in and out of traffic. Nope, no Sahara Exit. Maybe I hadn’t gone far enough North. I turned around again. Soon I was in North Las Vegas. I pulled off and parked by a fancy gas station/convenience store. I got a Styrofoam cup of coffee, sat down at a sheet metal café table inside the store, and went over my map and notes. Luckily I had started early, to allow for screw-ups, because…I was in an M. Escher map of Hell. Did the Hotel California have a casino?
No question about it. Sahara Boulevard was somewhere between the southern and northern city limits of Las Vegas. I had to go back again.
The gas station was beside a railroad track, actually about ten railroad tracks, and a bunch of warehouses, paralleling the highway. A long freight train was coming across the desert, to within twenty feet of where I was. I stopped to examine the cars. There was something like a hundred of them.

Many years ago my then love and I planned a trip to Newfoundland, but we weren’t sure we could pull it off. She suggested we look for Canadian National Railroad cars as an omen. She had used the same omen when she and her girlfriend, the one we were now going to visit, had gone there the summer before. We saw some, and we made the trip.  After we got back CN cars became our good luck omen. They never failed either of us. Over time she and I developed a complete method for divining from railroad cars. CN was good luck; Canadian Pacific meant a change, not necessarily good or bad. Union Pacific meant your relationship would go well. The Southern Railroad was easy, because their motto is “Gives a Green Light to Innovations.” Soldiers and martial artists wear cotton belts, so Cotton Belt means a hard fight.  Incidentally, I saw a whole railroad yard full of Cotton Belt railroad cars just before I moved from New York to L.A., and, boy, was that prophetic!
Burlington Northern means hard work. My Spanish pretty much stops at “Mas cervesa, por favor,” but, since Santa Fe is the most common freight car, I wondered what that meant. Santa means “saint” but…”St. Fay?” Not likely. Then one day, driving beside the tracks and trains paralleling I-25, in Denver going to Boulder, it hit me. Santa doesn’t just mean saint; it means “holy.” And “auto de fe” from the Spanish Inquisition means “act of faith.” “Santa Fe.” “Holy Faith.”  Running at 70 mph in heavy traffic, I laughed so hard my eyes teared and the car swerved. Hundreds of Santa Fe cars, thousands of them, everywhere. What a message!

Of course this railroad car thing is crazy. I love it for that alone. Who wouldn’t want a wild card dimension to his life, without the downsides that go with flagrant substance abuse or criminal behavior? Far better to be just a little nuts.

So here I was, parked, lost, by a railroad track next to a major freeway, where no one could possibly be lost, scanning a passing freight train. There were four Canadian National Railroad cars, four Canadian Pacific cars, four Union Pacific’s--which didn’t pertain to the situation at hand, but was reassuring anyway -- one BN, and all the rest were Santa Fes. I whooped. A big permanent positive change, with some work involved, was coming to my life. I hadn’t been lost. I had been directed, to find this omen, to learn that what was coming was big.

Now, where the hell was that shaman?

To be continued...

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About Jim Morris:  After careers as a professional soldier, war correspondent, magazine and book editor, novelist, non-fiction writer and television producer Jim Morris has turned his attention to esoteric subjects. He is a member of the Special Operations Association and the Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri.  Questions or comments for Jim, email: gymmo@earthlink.net.