Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

My advantage over you at this moment is that I know how to get to the nagual , and you don’t. But once I have gotten there I have no more advantage and no more knowledge than you.

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In moments of great danger, fear, or stress, push your belly down by pushing the diaphragm down while taking four sharp gasps of air through the mouth, followed by four deep inhalations and exhalations through the nose. The gasps of air have to be felt as jolts in the middle part of the body. Keeping the hands tightly clasped, covering the navel, gives strength to the midsection and helps to control the gasps and the deep inhalations, which have to be held for a count of eight as one presses the diaphragm down. The exhalations are done twice through the nose and twice through the mouth in a slow or accelerated fashion, depending on one’s preference.

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The nagual is only for witnessing. When one is dealing with the nagual , one should never look into it directly. The only way to look at the nagual is as if it were a common affair. One must blink in order to break the fixation. Our eyes are the eyes of the tonal , or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our eyes have been trained by the tonal , therefore the tonal claims them. One of the sources of an apprentice’s bafflement and discomfort is that his tonal doesn’t let go of his eyes. The day it does, his nagual will have won a great battle. Your obsession or, better yet, everyone’s obsession is to arrange the world according to the tonal ‘s rules; so every time we are confronted with the nagual , we go out of our way to make our eyes stiff and intransigent. I must appeal to the part of your tonal which understands this dilemma and you must make an effort to free your eyes. The point is to convince the tonal that there are worlds that can pass in front of the same windows. Let your eyes be free; let them be true windows. The eyes can be the windows to peer into boredom or to peek into that infinity.

All you have to do is to set up your intent as a customs house. Whenever you are in the world of the tonal , you should be an impeccable tonal ; no time for irrational crap. But whenever you are in the world of the nagual , you should also be impeccable; no time for rational crap. For the warrior, intent is the gate in between. It closes completely behind him when he goes either way.

Another thing one should do when facing the nagual is to shift the line of the eyes from time to time, in order to break the spell of the nagual . Changing the position of the eyes always eases the burden of the tonal . This shifting should be done only as a relief, though, not as another way of palisading yourself to safeguard the order to the tonal .

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If there are too many unnecessary items on your island you won’t be able to sustain the encounter with the nagual . No one is capable of surviving a deliberate encounter with the nagual without a long training. It takes years to prepare the tonal for such an encounter. Ordinarily, if an average man comes face to face with the nagual the shock would be so great that he would die. The goal of the warrior’s training then is not to teach him to hex or to charm, but to prepare his tonal not to crap out. A most difficult accomplishment. A warrior must be taught to be impeccable and thoroughly empty before he could even conceive witnessing the nagual .

The island of the tonal has to be swept clean and maintained clean. That’s the only alternative that a warrior has. A clean island offers no resistance; it is as if there were nothing there.

Nothing that we may have gained in the course of our lives can reveal to us the designs of power. A warrior must struggle like a demon to shrink his tonal ; and yet at the very moment the tonal shrinks, the warrior must reverse all that struggle to immediately halt that shrinking.

After the tonal shrinks, the warrior is closing the gate from the other side. As long as his tonal is unchallenged and his eyes are tuned only for the tonal ‘s world, the warrior is on the safe side of the fence. He’s on familiar ground and knows all the rules. But when his tonal shrinks, he is on the windy side, and that opening must be shut tight immediately, or he would be swept away.

As a rule the tonal must defend itself, at any cost, every time it is threatened; so it is of no real consequence how the tonal reacts in order to accomplish its defense. The only important matter is that the tonal of a warrior must become acquainted with other alternatives. What a teacher aims for, in this case, is the total weight of those possibilities. It is the weight of those new possibilities which helps to shrink the tonal . By the same token, it is the same weight which helps stop the tonal from shrinking out of the picture.

The nagual can perform extraordinary things, things that do not seem possible, things that are unthinkable for the tonal . But the extraordinary thing is that the performer has no way of knowing how those things happen. The secret of the sorcerer is that he knows how to get to the nagual , but once he gets there, your guess is as good as his as to what takes place.

Let’s say that the warrior learns to tune his will , to direct it to a pinpoint, to focus it wherever he wants. It is as if his will , which comes from the midsection of his body, is one single luminous fiber, a fiber that he can direct at any conceivable place. That fiber is the road to the nagual . Or I could also say that the warrior sinks into the nagual through that single fiber. Once he has sunk, the expression of the nagual is a matter of his personal temperament.

One of the aims of the warrior’s training is to cut the bewilderment of the tonal , until the warrior is so fluid that he can admit everything without admitting anything.

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The yell of a warrior is one of the most important issues of sorcery. You can focus on your yell, using it as a vehicle.

A warrior follows the dictums of power.

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The only way to fend off the nagual is to remain unaltered. The nagual is only for witnessing. So, we can talk about what we witness and about how we witness it. You want to take on the explanation of how it is all possible, though, and that is an abomination. You want to explain the nagual with the tonal . That is stupid. We make sense in talking only because we stay within certain boundaries, and those boundaries are not applicable to the nagual.

To be a perfect tonal means to be aware of everything that takes place on the island of the tonal . It takes a gigantic struggle to clean the island of the tonal.

We interpret any unknown expression of the nagual as something we know. The nagual might be interpreted as a breeze shaking the leaves, or even as some strange light, perhaps a lightning bug of unusual size. If a man who doesn’t see is pressed, he would say that he thought he saw something but could not remember what. This is only natural. The man would be talking sense. After all, his eyes would have judged nothing extraordinary; being the eyes of the tonal they have to be limited to the tonal ‘s world, and in that world there is nothing staggeringly new, nothing which the eyes cannot apprehend and the tonal cannot explain.

In order to be an average tonal a man must have unity. His whole being must belong to the island of the tonal . Without that unity the man would go berserk; a sorcerer, however, has to break that unity, but without endangering his being. A sorcerer’s goal is to last; that is, he doesn’t take unnecessary risks, therefore he spends years sweeping his island until a moment when he could, in a manner of speaking, sneak off it.

The whispering of the nagual will come at times and then vanish. Don’t be afraid of it, or of any unusual sensation that you may have from now on. But above all, don’t indulge and become obsessed with those sensations.

A warrior is, let’s say, a prisoner of power; a prisoner who has one free choice: the choice to act either like an impeccable warrior, or to act like an ass. In the final analysis, perhaps the warrior is not a prisoner but a slave of power, because that choice is no longer a choice for him. He cannot act in any other way but impeccably. To act like an ass would drain him and cause his demise.