Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/42

 ''surpassed. The good nahualli is depositary, there is something in its interior, guardian, observer. He observes, conserves, helps; hurts no one." ''

Returning to the Castaneda book, Don Juan uses the term tonal to speak of the known world —right side— or reason, and the term nagual, with two meanings, one that refers to the left side —"the other reality", of perception, the tonal counterpart— and another that refers to the name given to the man of knowledge, the leader of a warrior group named "nagual", as Don Juan was for his group, or Elias and Castaneda himself.

For Don Juan the tonal is born with man and dies with him; the nagual is the other part of the human being always there, before, during and after. The tonal is the world devised with reason; the nagual is the world of power, where the only thing man can do is "testify".

Castaneda receives knowledge through the "sweep" or tonal island clean up techniques, because the way of the Warrior is nothing but training to save energy by reducing personal importance, and be able to enter the nagual world. Don Juan tells Castaneda that a warrior cannot live groaning and complaining, because his life is a never-ending challenge, and there is no way for challenges to be beautiful or ugly, good or bad. Challenges are simply that, challenges. There lies the difference between common men and warriors. While for the first the world is full of blessings or curses, for the latter is an endless challenge, where their impeccability and their "controlled folly" is tested.

"—Only as warrior can one stand the knowledge path —he said—. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and there is no way that challenges are good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges... —The basic difference between a common man and a warrior is a that warrior takes everything as a challenge —he continued—, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse...

Then he asked me for details on how I had carried out the recommendations from don Genaro and him gave me about my everyday world and my relationships with people... When a warrior is forced to believe, he does it because so he chooses, as an expression his innermost predilection... A warrior does not believe; "a warrior must believe."... "So, if it were not because we are aware of the presence of our death, there would not be power, nor mystery."...

Having to believe that the world is mysterious and unfathomable was the intimate warrior predilection expression. Without it, the warrior had nothing..." C.C.

THE TONAL ISLAND

Don Juan says that all human beings have two separate entities forming a unit, the tonal and the nagual. The tonal is what "builds" the world of objects and ideas in which we live; there is a tonal for every one of us and a tonal for time, also for each epoch. The tonal is everything we are and imagine and is composed by a world description. The tonal makes "the rules" by which the world is perceived or "built" in a figurative sense. The tonal is a rational agreement used to transform an energy world, into a world of objects.

The nagual is the part of ourselves and the world that we will never know and much less through reason. The nagual is the part where the "power" resides, the unnamable. The Toltequity divides the world into three parts: what is known, what is