The description you have been given of the world is an aberrant one. It does not accept and give proper place to the nagual, to the mysterious unknown that is our heritage.
The island of the tonal, the way we see life, is there so we can get through our life. It was never intended to become a dictator that would usurp all other views of the world and banish them.
If the tonal predominates, which we see now more in the world, there's no mystery - understanding of consciousness or awareness.
Your reason is your friend. It defends the island of your awareness. But you don't want your reason to rule everything.
Everyone is on the verge of insanity ... insanity meaning on the verge of the unknown.
There are people who just can't handle life because they've thrown away too much of their reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reason is necessary. It is necessary to deal with the world.
If the tonal collapses completely, then you're crazy functionally, you're psychotic.
In the world order, if the nagual dominates and not the tonal, then we'll live in times of fear and superstition.
When one side or the other predominates, there's an imbalance and there's unhappiness.
The tonal is also endless and limitless. We like to think of it as being finite so we feel better.
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.
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 nagual gives you the unknown; it gives you reality; it leads you to the totality of yourself.
The nagual is the superconscious. It's nirvana. It's the unknown that cannot be explained or reasoned.
The nagual is the unknown. It cannot be talked about, it can only be witnessed.
Don Juan speaks of the island of the tonal as something that's in the middle of the ocean ... the nagual.
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.
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.
The tonal is the sense of place. It is order and reason in a world of chaos.
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.
