Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/45

 balance. This is the reason why, the Anahuac high studies school was called by the Toltecs, Calmécac, which in Nahuatl means "House of the measure".

The tonal world is everything we have and cannot be evaded. There is the battle field. The struggle to "polish the spirit" the Toltec metaphorically called, "The Florid Battle" and the weapons were "flower and song", understood as beauty and wisdom.

—"A basic warrior rule —he said— is making decisions with such care that nothing of what can happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less reduce his power. Being a warrior means being humble and alert... —Let's say that a basic rule for you must be that, when you come to see me, come prepared to die —he said—. If you come prepared to die, there will be no falls, unpleasant surprises, nor unnecessary actions. All will gently fall in place, because you are not expecting anything...

A warrior never leaves the tonal island. He uses it.

He pointed around with a quick gesture, and then touched my notebook.

—This is your world. You cannot give it up. It is useless to get angry and disillusioned with ourselves. This simply and plainly prove that our tonal is wrapped in an internal battle; a battle within the tonal is one of the stupidest struggles that can occur. The adjusted life of a warrior is designed to end this struggle. From the beginning I have taught you to avoid fatigue and wear. Now there is no longer the war you had inside, because the warrior path is harmony: harmony between actions and decisions, at first, and then harmony between tonal and nagual..." C.C.

THE NAGUAL HOUR

Humans are obsessed with adjusting the world with the tonal rules. The tonal is the basis of what we are as men in this world of ideas and "solid" objects. The tonal, through what is called the "first ring of power", devises "the world" with reason. The tonal should be a "guard" to protect this vital part of us; however, the guard turns into such a jealous and exaggerated "guardian" in his task that blocks the other complementing part of us: the nagual.

The tonal spends all the energy we have on "the tonal island", there we accumulate many vanities and unnecessary objects. The effort to sustain the "ideas" of how is the world, how we are and how should others be, plus sustaining our compulsive need to "have" consumes all the energy we have. In order to "attest" the nagual requires having enough energy available, and this energy is obtained by "cleaning our tonal island". The nagual and tonal world conform the human ambiance; that we cannot touch or recognize the first does not mean it does not exist. There are many ancient religions in the world that speak to us, with other words and other signs, of the nagual world and this is because it is an ancient and universal humanity knowledge. Knowledge that in the last 500 years has been denied by the western world due to its limited and arrogant seudo—rational scientific thinking.

The tonal and the nagual a pair of complementing opposites and this way of understanding the world has deep roots in the Anahuac civilization and in almost all ancient civilizations. The rational and the irrational are two facets that make up the totality of the human being; neither is more or less important than the other; on the contrary, they complement. For this reason, perhaps, modern man product of western culture have a slight dissatisfaction feeling originated by the fact of not being complete.