CHACALA, Mexico

“A glimpse of Paradise on Earth”, our American camping friends had described this place around a Caribbean coconut husk campfire. Months later, after wandering the Mexican and Guatemalan Sierras via Taurus and tent seeking other adventures, we located the long dirt road leading off Hwy 200 towards the fishing village of Chacala on the Pacific. “Nine miles of terrible road, but worth it in the end”, our friends had said, and they were right on both counts. It took us over two hours to travel that short distance, and once again we were thankful that on this trip we were relying on our tent and light gear rather that having to pull the Coleman pop-up around the washouts and broken cobblestone. Finally, about 4:30pm – too late in the early tropics day to try to get back to the highway and find safe overnite lodging, we crested a knoll and saw before us a cluster of coconut trees and four thatched restaurants beside a natural harbour. A few fishermen could be seen out setting their evening nets. To us weary travelers, it was indeed a “glimpse of Paradise”.

We made arrangements with the owner of the most outlying restaurant on the beach for the use of toilet and shower, and he told us to go ahead and set up camp anywhere. We were the only campers on the beach, so we didn’t want to be too far away from the restaurant, selecting for our campsite a couple of palms close enough together to sling our hammock., and an open spot between the volcanic rocks thrown around the beach to pitch our tent.. We were only 25 feet from high tide line, and the crashing Pacific breakers in the night took some getting used to.

The setting was idyllic, and the next morning we borrowed an old table and chairs from the restaurant, and dragged the book-box from the trunk. For many years I had wanted to read the Bible from beginning to end, to – for myself – see what my lineage had thought to be of value to pass on to succeeding generations, and the time and setting seemed right for this long-deferred project. One day while so engaged, there seemed to be more difficulty than usual in concentrating on the book, and on looking around, I saw this tall, youngish, gaunt peasant sitting on a basalt stone nearby, intently watching us. After a while, I went over to him and asked him what he wanted – a glass of water/pop/sandwich? – No, he said that he only wanted to talk with us. His name was Francisco, and he lived with, and worked for, his uncle on a small farm on the upper slopes of the dormant volcano forming the southern arm of the harbour. He asked if I was reading “La Biblia”, saying that he had not had the opportunity to learn to read very much himself – nor had he even seen many books - but that he was familiar with some Biblical teachings through the village missionary. He said that he didn’t understand them very well, (we had immediate affinity on that point) but having had much time on his uncle’s farm to ponder things out for himself, he discussed his personal insights as to creation and life – Now granted our Spanish is rather limited, and something may have shifted in translation, but this is the gist of the semi-illiterate Francisco’s thought:

We live, he said, in an immense and mostly invisible universe. The kaleidoscope of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, images and impulses that crowd our mind only skims reality's surface. From unfathomable depths, the things we experience emerge in a perpetual upwelling of creation. Just as constantly, these forms melt back into the unseen domain. This appearance and dissolution is a flow, a circulation or current, encompassing the visible and the hidden. [Uncannily, this sounded like the physicist David Bohm’s concept of ‘Wholeness and The Implicate Order’.]

Francisco said that, to him, the ultimate source of the creation current is 'the One’, a mystical entity which is not apart from all that flows from it and to it, but which contains and unites the whole turbulent cosmos within its perfect stillness. As an analogy to help in understanding the causing of ‘distinction’, he observed that in light there are no lines of distinction between the colors until separated out via prism or rainbow. All the colours are always present, but we need to ‘parse’ the light or rainbow to describe them: "Red / orange / yellow / green." So also with the circuit of existence, seamless and endless. The resultant divided creations cascade from the One into the sense-world through levels. At each step away from the One there is more diversity and less unity. More distinction. In our own human realm diversity rules, yet the unity of all is evident but only in subtle ways, sensed not through our deductive analysis of appearances, but by inductive, intuitive apperception of deeper, hidden forces.

Francisco described reality's first forms as he imagined them blooming from the One. Firstly, from the One there comes Two. Subsequently, the Two generates the Many. The numbers of ‘One’, ‘Two’ and ‘Many’ are not to be thought of as counters in their usual sense, but as symbols of creative presences. The primary pattern of the One resonates across succeeding levels, giving rise to the regularities of the sense-realm. For instance, the imprint of the Two can be detected throughout our world. Everything is composed of complementary dualities — gender, electronic polarities, light and dark, DNA, cold and hot, left and right, odd and even — knit together into the myriad objects we see around us. But everything in the cosmos yearns for its origin, the place where the opposites fuse. All longings in life, unmasked, are this. Francisco called this universal passion Erótico. The One loves the Many, and the Many the One, impelling and guiding the cosmic flow. Every duality is Erótico split in two, and the struggle of opposites that makes up our lives is the hide-and-seek of the halves of desire, the Lover and the Beloved. [or, as Lao Tzu put it, the yin and yang of manifested TAO]

Francisco also spoke to us of the forces most closely entwined with our daily lives, lurking just beneath the veneer of the mind and the physical world. These forces personify the natural energies that comprise our environment, and our characters mold these forces into the experiences that sway our fates. While we have the ‘play’ of these forces for experiential purposes, we are unable to influence their ends until such time as we have established mature relations with our personal creative energies – in effect it is necessary to “know oneself”, before “knowing” or influencing the energies of one’s environment..

The most fulfilling relationships — with self, others or environment — are based on the ability to love (the mark of the One) while keeping one’s own distinctness (the signature of the Two). This is Erótico’s transactional current, the play of the One and the Two. And we relate most intensely with our human counter-parts – with other persons. Francisco cautioned that the foregoing isn't a simple-minded projection of human traits onto non-human things, but a psychological device helping us to relate fully — that is, through Love’s erótico forces of creation.

That was the gist of Francisco’s indigenous thought, conveyed over three encounters across as many weeks. Then one week he didn’t come to visit us – our reading was also concluded and our supplies nearly exhausted – it was time to move on to the next page of our adventure.

[We revisited Chacala twice subsequently. Later years. Same sea, volcano, fishing boats. We even camped again in the same spot. But we never met up with Francisco again. Although we climbed the volcano and tried to find his farm, no one that we talked with could give us direction. A new, straight, 4km paved road has been pushed in from the highway, a Club Med style enclave has been constructed. Survey stakes are in place on the north arm of headland overlooking the harbour for a high priced subdivision, and the whole coastline has been zoned for major tourist development.

Paradise waits for no one – we had found Chacala just in time.]

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

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