Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

You will see that our ordinary view of the world cannot be final because it is only an interpretation.

Appendix C

The Rule

Alternate reading instead of the six paragraphs from “Again, human beings …” through “… ability to forget” (50 paragraphs from the begining) in The Eagle’s Gift

I will clarify the previously unimagined world of hidden memories which you have been recollecting thru dreaming, memories that you have been incapable of retrieving with your everyday-life memory. As I’ve said, human beings are divided in two. The right side, which is called the tonal , encompasses everything the intellect can conceive of. The left side, called the nagual , is a realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in words. The left side is perhaps comprehended, if comprehension is what takes place, with the total body; thus its resistance to conceptualization. All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of sorcery, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.

Taking as a base the concepts that we are divided in two and that everything is in the body itself, our time together has been divided between states of normal awareness; on the right side, the tonal , where the first attention prevails; and states of heightened awareness, on the left side, the nagual ; the site of the second attention.

I have lead you to the other self by means of the self-control of the second attention through dreaming . However, I have put you in direct touch with the second attention through bodily manipulation in the form of a sound blow on your back. The result of that blow is entrance into an extraordinary state of clarity. It seems that everything in that state goes faster, yet nothing in the world has been changed. That is to say, the world is the same but sharper. You stay clear until I give you another blow on the same spot to make you revert back to a normal state of awareness.

In those states of heightened awareness you’ve had an incomparable richness of personal interaction, a richness that your body has understood as a sensation of speeding. The richness of your perception on the left side has been, however, a post-facto realization. Your interaction appeared to be rich in the light of your capacity to remember it. You became cognizant then that in those states of heightened awareness you had perceived everything in one clump, one bulky mass of inextricable detail. You’ve called this ability to perceive everything at once–intensity . For years you have found it impossible to examine the separate constituent parts of those chunks of experience; you have been unable to synthesize those parts into a sequence that would make sense to the intellect. Since you were incapable of those syntheses, you could not remember. Your incapacity to remember was in reality an incapacity to put the memory of your perception on a linear basis. You could not lay your experiences flat, so to speak, and arrange them in a sequential order. The experiences were available to you, but at the same time they were impossible to retrieve, for they were blocked by a wall of intensity.

The task of remembering, then, is properly the task of joining our left and right sides, of reconciling those two distinct forms of perception into a unified whole. It is the task of consolidating the totality of oneself by rearranging intensity into a linear sequence.

The pragmatic step that I have taken to aid you in your task of remembering has been to make you interact with certain people while you were in a state of heightened awareness. I was very careful not to let you see those people when you were in a state of normal awareness. In this way I created the appropriate conditions for remembering.

Now that you have completed your remembering, you have detailed knowledge of social interactions which you have shared with my companions and me. These are not memories in the sense that you would remember an episode from your childhood; they are more than vivid moment-to-moment recollections of events. You have reconstructed conversations that seemed to be reverberating in your ears, as if you were listening to them. What you have remembered, from the point of view of your experiential self, was taking place now. Such has been the character of your remembering.

It is time now to tell you the “rule” as it pertains to the Nagual and his role, exactly as it was told to me. Being involved with the rule may be described as living a myth. In my case, a myth that caught me and made me the Nagual.

The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle, not because it is an eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle, standing erect as an eagle stands, its height reaching to infinity.

As the seer gazes on the blackness that the Eagle is, four blazes of light reveal what the Eagle is like, The first blaze, which is like a bolt of lightning, helps the seer make out the contours of the Eagle’s body. There are patches of whiteness that look like an eagle’s feathers and talons. A second blaze of lightning reveals the flapping, wind-creating blackness that looks like an eagle’s wings. With the third blaze of lightning the seer beholds a piercing, inhuman eye. And the fourth and last blaze discloses what the Eagle is doing.

The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle’s beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food.

The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things. There is no way, therefore, for man to pray to the Eagle, to ask favors, to hope for grace. The human part of the Eagle is too insignificant to move the whole.

It is only from the Eagle’s actions that a seer can tell what it wants. The Eagle, although it is not moved by the circumstances of any living thing, has granted a gift to each of those beings. In its own way and right, any one of them, if it so desires, has the power to keep the flame of awareness, the power to disobey the summons to die and be consumed. Every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and to go through it. It is evident to the seer who sees the opening, and to the creatures that go through it, that the Eagle has granted that gift in order to perpetuate awareness.

For the purpose of guiding living things to that opening, the Eagle created the Nagual. The Nagual is a double being to whom the rule has been revealed. Whether it be in the form of a human being, an animal, a plant, or anything else that lives, the Nagual by virtue of its doubleness is drawn to seek that hidden passageway.

The Nagual comes in pairs, male and female, A double man and a double woman become the Nagual only after the rule has been told to each of them, and each of them has understood it and accepted it in full.

To the eye of the seer, a Nagual man or Nagual woman appears as a luminous egg with four compartments. Unlike the average human being, who has two sides only, a left and a right, the Nagual has a left side divided into two long sections, and a right side equally divided in two.

The Eagle created the first Nagual man and Nagual woman as seers and immediately put them in the world to see. It provided them with four female warriors who were stalkers, three male warriors, and one male courier, whom they were to nourish, enhance, and lead to freedom.

The female warriors are called the four directions, the four corners of a square, the four moods, the four winds, the four different female personalities that exist in the human race.

The first is the east. She is called order. She is optimistic, lighthearted, smooth, persistent like a steady breeze.

The second is the north. She is called strength. She is resourceful, blunt, direct, tenacious like a hard wind.

The third is the west. She is called feeling. She is introspective, remorseful, cunning, sly, like a cold gust of wind.

The fourth is the south. She is called growth. She is nurturing, loud, shy, warm, like a hot wind.

The three male warriors and the courier are representative of the four types of male activity and temperament.