The people to become enlightened in Atlantis lit the "flame of enlightenment" on earth for the first time. The members of the various mystery schools have kept the flame alive by passing on the secret techniques for attaining enlightenment from the time of Atlantis to our present day.
The world has always been this way. I am sure in the mystery world of Egypt, ancient Atlantis, you pick a cosmos - There is always somebody on your case.
God, Atlantis was only yesterday. Let alone Los Angeles. Remember that incarnation in Los Angeles?
You see, Buddhists are optimists. We never saw sunsets in Atlantis like we do now. We didn't have those great chemicals in the air.
There are two sides to a person's being - the superconscious and the conscious. These have reverberations in the popular works of Carlos Castaneda, in the don Juan terminology of the tonal and the nagual.
The tonal is the sense of place. It is order and reason in a world of chaos.
The world is always chaos, but we pretend that it's not because it makes us feel better. In doing so we're able to go through it in a specific manner and form: That's the tonal.
Each one of you has created a sense of self. That's what the tonal does. Each one of you is taught a system of maintenance that has been developed by humankind from your birth till your death.
Don Juan speaks of the island of the tonal as something that's in the middle of the ocean ... the nagual.
The nagual is the unknown. It cannot be talked about, it can only be witnessed.
The nagual is the superconscious. It's nirvana. It's the unknown that cannot be explained or reasoned.
The nagual gives you the unknown; it gives you reality; it leads you to the totality of yourself.
When we go to the desert, it's pure nagual. There you witness stupendous and incredible acts of power that your reason cannot possibly deal with.
The deeper side of the study occurs on levels of attention your mind is not aware of, but that your superconscious mind is - what don Juan calls the nagual.
The tonal is also endless and limitless. We like to think of it as being finite so we feel better.
When one side or the other predominates, there's an imbalance and there's unhappiness.
In the world order, if the nagual dominates and not the tonal, then we'll live in times of fear and superstition.
If the tonal collapses completely, then you're crazy functionally, you're psychotic.
Reason is necessary. It is necessary to deal with the world.
A person who is insane has no sense of their place; they've lost that ability, which our friend don Juan describes as the tonal.
You need your reason to pass through the world and also to experience the nagual, because if you become all nagual, we'll lock you away in an institution.
The reason why there's such a rigid repression of the mentally ill is the psyche of humanity senses something. It senses that it doesn't want to deal with the unknown.
Occasionally in my travels I meet people who have pushed too far into the nagual. These individuals are not too balanced but they have made great journeys in the unknown.
There are people who just can't handle life because they've thrown away too much of their reason.
Everyone is on the verge of insanity ... insanity meaning on the verge of the unknown.
