At the end of the nineties of the last century I was with the Tai Chi master Pedro Valencia, in Tenerife. The night I arrived, after sending him greetings from a former student of his who lived in Nicaragua, we took the road along a narrow road until we reached a small town called Rojas, half abandoned by the sea, with views of the horizon in which the sun set. The host was Pepe, an exceptional martial arts practitioner, and there were also three other instructors, Carmelo, Fran and Jorge, and two students, Paco, who is now a great instructor, and me. We talk about the divine and the human, but there was an event from his youth, which Pedro Valencia told us, about which we can guess the presence of unconscious energies beyond what can be explained.
He said that, in his native Extremadura, it was relatively common for houses to be monitored when breastfed babies had nutritional problems, and if this was the case, dust or grit was spread on the ground to locate the trail of a snake that was managed to interpose itself between the mother’s breast and the child’s mouth: the snake subtracted the mother’s milk with its mouth, meanwhile it put its tail in the child’s mouth, when they both slept at night, in a similar way to how the rats can approach, thanks to the control of their breathing, without anyone noticing them. Snakes are the most abundant symbol to express the chthonic, medullary, original, gross energies, as original as the phylogenetic record of our brain has an ancient part that we call reptilian. The shearwaters’ nanguidos interrupted, at dawn, the silence continually interrupted by the violence of the waves that broke just five meters away in the sea of petrified lava on which we lived, and darkness fell resoundingly over the territory from which it could be seen in the distance the Valley of La Orotava. Pedro Valencia used a trick to get us up early the next day. The stipulated time was a quarter past six in the morning, a few minutes away from dawn. But he kept his watch on Madrid time, from where he had just arrived. So, when the alarm clock rang, in that place where we lacked light and noise, and clocks that linked us to urban reality, we thought that the sun would soon rise. But it didn’t happen that way, and it took, and took, and took.
We begin to shower in a rustic stream of cold water from some deep water table. The bodies woke up and gained vigor to practice, some Chi Kung and others the Chen style Tai Chi form. Meanwhile, the sun did not come, and we were beginning to miss each other. We began to believe that the End Times had arrived, and when concern about that cosmic anomaly became inevitable, Pedro Valencia’s stratagem of surreptitiously hiding us for an hour of time was discovered. We all agree, with the warm infusion of breakfast, that in modern life we leave the passing of time to the clocks, and our natural rhythmometer is asleep. However, in some human activities the relationship with the clock is rendered useless, such as in music or in the game of basketball. Neurologist Warren Meck studied basketball players and found that different parts of their brains process different tasks: cells in the visual system look for holes to hit the ball, those in the motor system control movement, and those in the auditory system control information. all at different speeds, five times per second, ten times per second, or up to forty times per second. However, the brain integrates all the speeds into a single result.
Dr. Peter Mangan carried out, for his part, the experiment of having people of different ages guess when three minutes of time had elapsed, either by simply counting it, or by carrying out an activity such as, for example, delivering mail. Those between 19 and 24 years old were the closest to reality, those between 45 and 50 years old were less precise and felt time pass faster, and for those between 60 and 70 years old time passed a 20 percent faster than for youth. Also, in the thirties of the 20th century, the psychologist Hudson Hoagland found that by subjecting the brain to heat, time passed faster and, on the contrary, when the body temperature dropped by two or three degrees, the passage of time it slowed down
Well, there, on that sullen beach in Tenerife, with Pedro Valencia, we were able to see how a jet of energy and youth fell on us, until we cried out to the sun to rise earlier, suspecting that it had stopped, so that we were impelled by vital speed.
