Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/41

 —We are receivers. We realize; we are not objects; we are not solid. We have no limits. The world of objects and sound is a way of making our way through earth more convenient. It is only a description created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forgets that a description is only a description and thus we trap ''our totality in a vicious circle from in we rarely come out alive... ''

"We, the luminous beings are born with two rings of power, but we only use one to create the world. This ring, gets hooked right after we are born, it is reason, and its partner speech. Between the two they plot and maintain the world.

"So, in essence, the world your reason wants to support is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, that reason learn to accept and defend.

"The luminous beings secret is that they have another ring of power that is never used, will The witch trick is the same trick common men use. Both have a description: one, the common man sustains it with his reason; the other, the witch sustains with his will. Both descriptions have their rules and rules are perceived, but the witch advantage is that his will covers more than reason..." C.C. TONAL AND NAGUAL

Before entering this chapter of the book we wish to comment some issues about the terms tonal and nagual. It has been our intention to find connections between the concepts that Castaneda describes about the knowledge that Don Juan called "toltequity", and he states are very remote "Toltec" practices. This is also noted in some history and anthropology academic texts.

This knowledge form —that could not be called "philosophy" because knowledge is not learned through reason— is, we believe, the conducting wire or "philosophical" cultural matrix of the Anahuac. But it is prudent to note that the coincidences between this knowledge and some academic studies, is richer in the traditions, customs, practices and oral legacy of indigenous peoples, that without a rational processes, follow many of the Toltequity techniques naturally, through "customs", as they have done for hundreds of years.

Currently it is immensely more difficult to live as indigenous, than to live as a beggar or underemployed in the misery belts of the cities. That internal strength shown by indigenous peoples over the past 500 years of oppression, we believe it has been possible, largely because it was fueled by the "non-rational" knowledge underlying their traditions and customs, in their culture. This same knowledge is also manifested, one way or another, in the variety of popular cultures that make up the current face of our country. The concepts of tonal and nagual aren't strange to any Mexican. There are many Nahuatl words we use daily in our urban Spanish. For example, Tonatiuh is the Sun; Tonatzin is our beloved mother or the Virgin of Guadalupe. Alfredo Lopez Austin, in the book “Human body and ideology, ancient Nahua conceptions”, page 223 notes: "... The noun TONALLI, derived from the verb TONA "radiate" ("make heat or Sun", according to Molina), has the following main meanings: 1. irradiation; 2 solar heat; 3 summer; 4 day; 5. Day symbol; 6. fate of the person by the day of birth; 7. "the soul and spirit" (Molina: Totonal); 8. something that is destined or property of a determined person (Molina: tetónal)."

And on page 418, Lopez Austin, while discussing nagualismo descriptions, returns to a text by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: "The nahual is the sage, holder of speeches, owner of the deposit, superhuman, respected, grave, serious, not mocked, not