Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/59

 —A witch is a Toltec when he has been initiated in the mysteries of stalking and dreaming —said very calmly—. The Nagual and Genaro were initiated by their benefactor and retained these mysteries in their bodies. We do the same, and that is why are Toltec, as the Nagual and Genaro.

The Nagual taught us, you and me, to be dispassionate. I am more dispassionate than you because I lack a form. You still preserved it and are empty. In other words, you have all sorts of problems. One day, however, you will be complete and you will realize that the Nagual was right. He claimed that the world of people goes up and down and people goes up and down with their world; as witches, we do not have to follow them in their ups and downs.

>>The witches art of is being removed from everything and being unnoticed. And, above all, in not wasting power. The Nagual informed me that your problem is that you always get tangled in crap, like now...

—Don Juan asserted that our being core was the act of perceiving and the magic of our being was becoming conscious. For him the perception and consciousness constituted a single, integral, functional unit, a unit with two spheres. The first of these was the “tonal attention", namely the ordinary people ability to perceive and locate their conscience in the ordinary world, of daily life. Don Juan also called this attention form the “first ring of power", and described it as our terrible but undisputed power to bring order to our perception of the world.

-The second sphere covered "nagual attention”, this is the witches ability to place their conscience in the non-ordinary world. He called this area the "second ring of power": the completely stormy faculty, we all had, but only the witches used to order that other world...

What don Juan had struggled to defeat, or rather suppress in me, was not my reason in the sense of rational thought ability, but my "tonal attention" or conscience of the common sense world...

Don Juan had said that our first “ring of power" enters our lives in very early times and we live under the impression that this is our world. The “second ring of power", the "nagual attention" remains hidden for the vast majority of us, and reveals to us just at the instant of our death. However, there is a way to get to it, available to everyone, but it is only taken by witches: the “dream”. “Dreaming”, in essence consists in transforming ordinary dreams into volitional issues. The dreamers, through the process of focusing “the nagual attention” on issues and events of ordinary dreams, they transform it into “reverie”...

We chose to be warriors or ordinary men. There is no second chance. Not on this earth...

6 The second attention

The Nagual got tired of telling you that the only freedom available to warriors consists of their impeccable conduct...

Dreaming is the only way to focus the second attention without damage, without it being threatening or horrifying...

The Nagual told me that humans were fragile creatures composed of many luminosity layers. When you see them, they seem to have fibers, but they are actually onion-like layers. Shocks, of any kind, separate these layers and can cause death...

Men need to be hooked. Women do not. Women can enter all freely. Therein lies their power and disadvantage. Men must be guided and women, contained...

You behaved as a common man. The Nagual had prepared us to be warriors. Said that a warrior was not compassionate for anyone. For him, feeling compassion meant wishing that the other person was like us, was in one’s place and that this is the reason