An immortal being has all the time in the world for doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot cling to the meanings made under the tonal ‘s order, because he knows for a fact that the totality of himself has but a little time on this earth.
A warrior cannot be helpless, or bewildered or frightened, not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power, impeccability replenishes it.
Impeccability is to do your best in whatever you’re engaged in. The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act like an immortal being that has all the time in the world you are not impeccable; at those times you should turn, look around, and then you will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are no survivors on this earth!
Turn off your internal dialogue and let something in you flow out and expand. That something is your perception, but don’t try to figure out what I mean. Just let the whispering of the nagual guide you.
* * *
There’s no future. The future is only a way of talking. For a sorcerer there is only the here and now.
Everything that I’ve done with you was done to accomplish one single task, the task of cleaning and reordering your island of the tonal . I’ve told you countless times that a most drastic change is needed if you want to succeed in the path of knowledge. That change is not a change of mood, or attitude, or outlook; that change entails the transformation of the island of the tonal .
Once that transformation has been accomplished a teacher would usually say to his disciple that he has arrived at a final crossroad. To say such a thing is misleading, though. In my opinion there is no final crossroad, no final step to anything. And since there is no final step to anything, there shouldn’t be any secrecy about any part of our lot as luminous beings. Personal power decides who can or who cannot profit by a revelation; my experiences with my fellow men have proven to me that very, very few of them would be willing to listen; and of those few who listen even fewer would be willing to act on what they have listened to; and of those who are willing to act even fewer have enough personal power to profit by their acts. So, the matter of secrecy about the sorcerers’ explanation boils down to a routine, perhaps a routine as empty as any other routine.
At any rate, you know now about the tonal and the nagual , which are the core of the sorcerers’ explanation. To know about them seems to be quite harmless. We are talking innocently about them as if they were just an ordinary topic of conversation. But before we venture beyond this point a fair warning is required; a teacher is supposed to speak in earnest terms and warn his disciple that the harmlessness and placidity of this moment are a mirage, that there is a bottomless abyss in front of him, and that once the door opens there is no way to close it again.
The years of hard training are only a preparation for the warrior’s devastating encounter with whatever lies out there, beyond this point. What will happen in that encounter depends on whether or not you have enough personal power to focus your unwavering attention on the wings of your perception, so let’s review what we’ve done.
The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Accepting that seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we know everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.
In order to stop the view of the world which one has held since the cradle, it is not enough to just wish or make a resolution. One needs a practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking. It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else which has power in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract attention.
Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal , it floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its creations. In fact, it is that attention that creates the order of the world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all, uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue.
The right way of walking is a subterfuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers, draws attention to the arms; and then by looking fixedly, without focusing his eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc that starts at the tip of his feet and ends above the horizon, literally floods his tonal with information. The tonal , without its one-to-one relation with the elements of its description, is incapable of talking to itself, and thus one becomes silent.
The position of the fingers does not matter at all. The only consideration is to draw attention to the arms by clasping the fingers in various unaccustomed ways. The important thing is the manner in which the eyes, by being kept unfocused, detect an enormous number of features of the world without being clear about them. The eyes in that state are capable of picking out details which are too fleeting for normal vision.
Together with the right way of walking, a teacher must teach his apprentice another possibility, which is even more subtle: the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting rewards–acting just for the hell of it. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that the success of a teacher’s enterprise depends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his apprentice in this specific respect.
Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers’ world. The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue. There are two major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming .
The secret of all this is one’s attention. All of this exists only because of our attention. This very rock where we’re sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give our attention to it as a rock.
Erasing personal history and dreaming should only be a help. What any apprentice needs to buffer him is temperance and strength. That’s why a teacher introduces the warrior’s way, or living like a warrior. This is the glue that joins together everything in a sorcerer’s world. Bit by bit a teacher must forge and develop it. Without the sturdiness and levelheadedness of the warrior’s way there is no possibility of withstanding the path of knowledge.
In order to help erase personal history three other techniques are taught. They are: losing self-importance, assuming responsibility, and using death as an adviser. Without the beneficial effect of those three techniques, erasing personal history would involve the apprentice in being shifty, evasive and unnecessarily dubious about himself and his actions.
By now there is no way for you to recollect the immense effort that you needed to establish self-pity as a feature of your island. Self-pity bore witness to everything you did. It was just at your fingertips, ready to advise you. Death is considered by a warrior to be a more amenable adviser, which can also be brought to bear witness on everything one does, just like self-pity, or wrath. Obviously, after an untold struggle you have learned to feel sorry for yourself. But you can also learn, in the same way, to feel your impending end, and thus you can learn to have the idea of your death at your fingertips. As an adviser, self-pity is nothing in comparison to death.
There is seemingly a contradiction in the idea of change; on the one hand, the sorcerers’ world calls for a drastic transformation, and on the other, the sorcerers’ explanation says that the island of the tonal is complete and not a single element of it can be removed. Change, then, does not mean obliterating anything but rather altering the use assigned to those elements.
Take self-pity for instance. There is no way to get rid of it for good; it has a definite place and character in your island, a definite facade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, self-pity becomes active. It has history. If you then change the facade of self-pity, you would have shifted its place of prominence.