Victor Villaseñor - Lion Eyes

Copyright 2011 by Victor Villaseor

Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Cover design: Charles McStravick Interior design: Tricia Breidenthal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private useother than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviewswithout prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Villaseor, Victor.

Lion eyes / Victor E. Villaseor.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4019-3200-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Tarahumara IndiansReligion. 2. Tarahumara IndiansMissions. 3. Tarahumara IndiansLand tenureMexicoChihuahua (State) 4. Milburn, Jan. 5. MissionariesMexicoChihuahua (State)Biography. 6. TotemismMexicoChihuahua (State) 7. Chihuahua (Mexico : State)Religious life and customs. I. Title.

F1221.T25M558 2011

972.16004'974546dc23

2011018259

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-3200-8
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4019-3201-5

14 13 12 11 4 3 2 1
1st edition, October 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Okay, you have just finished reading Lion Eyes, and it was a good, fast read and you enjoyed it, but now part of you is wondering if certain parts of this story are true, or if its all fiction and/or mostly an exaggerated lie by methe authorand Jan Milburn.

Well, if you have any of these thoughts and doubts, let me tell you, you are not alone. I myself, Victor E. Villaseor, received 265 rejections before I sold my first book, A La Bravathe title of which my New York publisher Bantam changed to Macho!and it was compared to the best of John Steinbeck by the L.A. Times. And in the case of my first bestseller, Rain of Goldthe true story of my dad and mom and my two Indian grandmothersI had to buy the rights to that book back from the New York publisher Putnam, because Phyllis Grann, the chairman of the board and president of Putnam, wanted to call it fiction. All this is well documented in my book Beyond Rain of Gold.

In fact, all your doubts and questions are addressed in Beyond Rain of Gold. You see, simply, what I have been writing about for more than 50 years is completely outside the box of Western civilization, which is based on 5 senses. So for you to doubt and not accept what I write about as being true is expected, because for you to understand this incredible Spiritual Journey that Jan Milburn, a white guy (as his son Joaquin calls him), went through, youd have to be outside of your civilized thinking head and return to those days when we were all indigenous people the whole world over and we were WILD OF HEART AND ALIVE OF SOUL AND WE UTILIZED ALL OF OUR NATURAL 13 SENSES!

And the extent of this gap of credibility is larger than the Grand Canyon, yet I really didnt fully comprehend the size of the gap until Id interviewed Jan and his familia for well over three years and Id traveled to Durango, Colorado; and Chihuahua and Creel, Mexico, several times. Then finally, I began to realize that in my attempt to make sure Jan and Mireyas story was believable to a modern-day reader, I saw that Id gathered way too much information, so my job as a writer would now be to thin things out and assemble a more focused story that would be reader friendly.

You see, the same thing happened to me when Id been working on the original Rain of Gold, which took me more than 16 years to write and get published. Why? Because bluntly, I, too, at times had difficulty believing that my parents stories were true, so in trying to make sure their story was believable, I also just kept gathering information on top of information until I finally had a 1,500-page book with more than 300 characters.

This was when my dad one day told me in frustration that Id never be able to understand the life he and my mother had lived, because Id become too gringo-ized. Mijito, hed said to me, understand this, your grandmothers didnt believe in God. Get it! They lived with the Almighty with their every breath! But youve become so tapado in your head that you cant see this, because your very eyes are covered over with caca!

What could I say? Id almost felt like quitting, because what my dad was telling me was that Id never be able to understand what he and my mother had been through with my two Indian grandmothers, because I was so constipated in the brain that my very eyes were covered with shit. My dad had never been one to be subtle. Then hed also added that my heart had been tamed, and in order for a soul to live, the heart had to be WILD!

But I didnt give up. In fact, what my dad told me motivated me to get into an even higher gear, and I rewrote the entire 1,500-page book five more times and then finally broke it down into the trilogy of Wild Steps of Heaven, Rain of Gold, and Thirteen Senses. And this time I didnt question and try to understand what it was that my dad and mom told me. No, I just wrote it down as they gave it to me.

So please, dear reader, dont be too hard on yourself and/or on Lion Eyes, which youve just finished reading, because you wouldnt even be reading these pages if you werent a person whos ready to let go of what you know to be reality and LEAP BACK INTO THE FUTURE where we were once all indigenous people!

A civilized plant, like a rose, you need to water and spray and feed or it will die; but to an indigenous plant, like a weed, you give it nothing and it lives. You poison it and it comes back a year later. You pour cement over it and it will break the concrete reaching for the sunlight of God, and this is where we are all going collectively: back to a time when we were ALL WILD OF HEART AND ALIVE OF SOUL AND AS INDESTRUCTIBLE AS WEEDS!

Read Beyond Rain of Gold and the original Rain of Gold; then return to Lion Eyes once again, and you will then see how Western civilization has basically taken over the whole world with 5 senses and the languaging of English, so, of course, it is now nearly impossible for us to step outside of our civilized, English-speaking, Western-thinking, boxed-in reality long enough to see anything thats different and/or outside of that box!

So realizing this, I could now see that I had a far more serious problem with Jans story than Id ever had with my dad and moms story, because with theirs, Id had their indigenous mothers explaining things to them, and in Jans story I had no such people.