The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 04 - Having To Believe.

I walked towards downtown on the Paseo de la Reforma. I was tired. The altitude of Mexico City no doubt had something to do with it. I could have taken a bus or a taxi but somehow in spite of my fatigue I wanted to walk. It was Sunday afternoon. The traffic was minimal and yet the exhaust fumes of the buses and trucks with diesel engines made the narrow streets of downtown seem like canyons of smog.

I arrived at the Zocalo and noticed that the cathedral of Mexico City seemed to be more slanted than the last time I had seen it. I stepped a few feet inside the enormous halls. A cynical thought crossed my mind.

From there I headed for the Lagunilla market. I had no definite purpose in mind. I walked aimlessly but at a good pace without looking at anything in particular. I ended up at the stands of old coins and secondhand books.

"Hello, hello! Look who is here!" someone said, tapping me lightly on the shoulder.

The voice and the touch made me jump. I quickly turned to my right. My mouth opened in surprise. The person who had spoken to me was don Juan.

"My God, don Juan!" I exclaimed and a shiver shook my body from head to toe. "What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?" he retorted as an echo.

I told him that I had stopped in the city for a couple of days before venturing into the mountains of central Mexico to search for him.

"Well let us say then that I came down from the mountains to find you," he said, smiling.

He patted me on the shoulder several times. He seemed to be glad to see me. He put his hands on his hips and swelled his chest, and asked me whether or not I liked his appearance. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing a suit. The full impact of such an incongruity hit me. I was dumfounded.

"How do you like my tacuche?" he asked, beaming. He used the slang word 'tacuche' instead of the standard Spanish word 'traje' for suit.

"Today I am in a suit," he said as if he had to explain, and then pointing to my open mouth he added, "Close it! Close it!"

I laughed absent-mindedly. He noticed my confusion. His body shook with laughter as he turned around so I could see him from every angle. His attire was incredible. He was wearing a light brown suit with pin stripes, brown shoes, a white shirt, and a necktie! And that made me wonder if he had any socks on, or... Was he wearing his shoes without them?

What added to my bewilderment was the maddening sensation I had had that when don Juan tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around, I thought I had seen him in his khaki pants and shirt, his sandals, and his straw hat.

And then as he made me aware of his attire, and as I focused my attention on every detail of it, the complete unit of his dress became fixed as if I had created it with my thoughts. My mouth seemed to be the area of my body which was most taxed by the surprise. It opened involuntarily. Don Juan touched me gently on my chin as if he were helping me to close it.

"You certainly are developing a double chin," he said and laughed in short spurts.

I became aware then that he did not have a hat on, and that his short white hair was parted on the right side. He looked like an old Mexican gentleman; an impeccably tailored urban dweller.

I told him that to have found him there was so unnerving to me that I had to sit down. He was very understanding and suggested that we go to a nearby park.

We walked a few blocks in complete silence and then we arrived at the Plaza Garibaldi; a place where musicians offered their services; a sort of musicians' employment center.

Don Juan and I merged with scores of spectators and tourists, and walked around the park. After a while he stopped, leaned against a wall, and pulled his pants up slightly at the knees. He was wearing light brown socks. I asked him to tell me the meaning of his mysterious apparel. His vague reply was that he simply had to be in a suit that day for reasons that would be clear to me later.

Finding Don Juan in a suit had been so unearthly that my agitation was almost uncontrollable. I had not seen him for several months and I wanted more than anything else in the world to talk with him; but somehow the setting was wrong and my attention meandered around. Don Juan must have noticed my anxiety and suggested that we walk to La Alameda, a more quiet park a few blocks away.

There were not too many people in the park and we had no trouble finding an empty bench. We sat down. My nervousness had given way to a feeling of uneasiness. I did not dare to look at don Juan.

There was a long unnerving pause. Still without looking at him, I said that the inner voice had finally driven me to search for him; that the staggering events I had witnessed at his house had affected my life very deeply, and that I just had to talk about them.

He made a gesture of impatience with his hand and said that his policy was never to dwell on past events.

"What is important now is that you have fulfilled my suggestion," he said. "You have taken your daily world as a challenge, and the proof that you have stored sufficient personal power is the indisputable fact that you have found me with no difficulty whatever at the precise spot where you were supposed to."

"I doubt very much that I could take credit for that," I said.

"I was waiting for you and then you showed up," he said. "That is all I know. That is all any warrior would care to know."

"What is going to happen now that I have found you?" I asked.

"For one thing," he said, "we will not discuss the dilemmas of your reason. Those experiences belong to another time and to another mood. They are, properly speaking, only steps of an endless ladder. To emphasize them would take away from the importance of what is taking place now. A warrior cannot possibly afford to do that."

I had an almost invincible desire to complain. It was not that I resented anything that had happened to me but I craved solace and sympathy. Don Juan appeared to know my mood and spoke as if I had actually voiced my thoughts.

"Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge," he said. "A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges."

His tone was dry and severe, but his smile was warm and disarming.

"Now that you are here, what we will do is wait for an omen," he said.

"What kind of omen?" I asked.

"We need to find out whether your power can stand on its own," he said. "The last time it petered out miserably. This time the circumstances of your personal life appear to have given you, at least on the surface, all the necessaries to deal with the sorcerers' explanation."

"Is there a chance that you might tell me about it?" I asked.

"It depends on your personal power," he said. "As is always the case in the doings and not-doings of warriors, personal power is the only thing that matters. So far, I should say that you are doing fine."

After a moment's silence, as if wanting to change the subject, he stood up and pointed to his suit.

"I have put on my suit for you," he said in a mysterious tone. "This suit is my challenge. Look how good I look in it! How easy! Eh? Nothing to it!"

Don Juan did look extraordinarily well in a suit. All I could think of as a gauge for comparison was the way my grandfather used to look in his heavy English flannel suit. He always gave me the impression that he felt unnatural; out of place in a suit. Don Juan, on the contrary, was so at ease.

"Do you think it is easy for me to look natural in a suit?" don Juan asked.

I did not know what to say. I concluded to myself, however, that judging by his appearance and by the way he conducted himself: it was the easiest thing in the world for him.

"To wear a suit is a challenge for me," he said. "A challenge as difficult as wearing sandals and a poncho would be for you. You have never had the necessity to take that as a challenge, though. My case is different. I am an Indian."

We looked at each other. He raised his brows in a silent question as if asking for my comments.

"The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge," he went on, "while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse. The fact that you are here today indicates that you have tipped the scales in favor of the warrior's way."

His stare made me feel nervous. I tried to get up and walk, but he made me sit down.

"You are going to sit here without fretting until we are through," he said imperatively. "We are waiting for an omen. We can not proceed without it because it is not enough that you found me; as it was not enough that you found Genaro that day in the desert. Your power must round itself up and give an indication."

"I can not figure out what you want," I said.

"I saw something prowling around this park," he said.

"Was it the ally?" I asked.

"No. It was not. So, we must sit here and find out what kind of omen your power is rounding up."

He then asked me to give him a detailed account of how I had carried out the recommendations made by don Genaro and himself about my daily world, and my relations with people.

I felt a bit embarrassed. He put me at ease with the argument that my personal affairs were not private because they included a task of sorcery that he and don Genaro were fostering in me. I jokingly remarked that my life had been ruined because of that task of sorcery; and recounted the difficulties in maintaining my day-to-day world.

I talked for a long time. Don Juan laughed at my account until tears were rolling down his cheeks. He slapped his thighs repeatedly. That gesture, which I had seen him do hundreds of times, was definitely out of place when it was done on the pants of a suit. I was filled with apprehension which I was compelled to voice.

"Your suit scares me more than anything you have done to me," I said.

"You will get used to it," he said. "A warrior must be fluid, and must shift harmoniously with the world around him; whether it is the world of 'reason', or the world of 'will'.

"The most dangerous aspect of that shifting comes forth every time the warrior finds that the world is neither one nor the other. I was told that the only way to succeed in that crucial shifting was by proceeding in one's actions as if one believed.

"In other words, the secret of a warrior is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior cannot just say he believes and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe would exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice as an expression of his innermost predilection. A warrior does not believe. A warrior has to believe."

He stared at me for a few seconds as I wrote in my notebook. I remained silent. I could not say that I understood the difference, but I did not want to argue or ask questions. I wanted to think about what he had said, but my mind meandered as I looked around. On the street behind us there was a long line of automobiles and buses, blowing their horns. At the edge of the park perhaps twenty yards away directly in line with the bench where we were sitting, a group of about seven people, including three policemen in light gray uniforms, stood over a man lying motionless on the grass. He seemed to be drunk or perhaps seriously ill.

I glanced at don Juan. He had also been looking at the man.

I told him that for some reason I was incapable of clarifying by myself what he had just said to me.

"I do not want to ask questions any more," I said. "But if I do not ask you to explain, I do not understand. Not to ask questions is very abnormal for me."

"Please be normal, by all means," he said with feigned seriousness.

I said that I did not understand the difference between believing and having to believe. To me both were the same. To conceive that the statements were different was splitting hairs.

"Remember the story you once told me about your friend and her cats?" he asked casually.

He looked up at the sky and leaned back against the bench, stretching his legs. He put his hands behind his head and contracted the muscles of his whole body. As it always happens, his bones made a loud cracking sound.

He was referring to a story I had once told him about a friend of mine who found two kittens, almost dead, inside a dryer in a laundromat. She revived them, and through excellent nourishment and care groomed them into two gigantic cats, a black one and a reddish one.

Two years later she sold her house. Since she could not take the cats with her, and was unable to find another home for them, all she could do under the circumstances was to take them to an animal hospital and have them put to sleep.

I helped her take them. The cats had never been inside a car. She tried to calm them down. They scratched and bit her, especially the reddish cat, the one she called Max. When we finally arrived at the animal hospital, she took the black cat first. Holding it in her arms and without saying a word, she got out of the car. The cat played with her Pawing her gently as she pushed open the glass door to enter the hospital.

I glanced at Max. He was sitting in the back. The movement of my head must have scared him, for he dove under the driver's seat. I made the seat slide backwards. I did not want to reach under it for fear that he would bite or scratch my hand. The cat was lying inside a depression on the floor of the car. He seemed very agitated. His breathing was accelerated. He looked at me. Our eyes met and an overwhelming sensation possessed me. Something took hold of my body; a form of apprehension, despair, or perhaps embarrassment for being part of what was taking place.

I felt a need to explain to Max that it was my friend's decision, and that I was only helping her. The cat kept on looking at me as if he understood my words.

I looked to see if she was coming. I could see her through the glass door. She was talking to the receptionist. My body felt a strange jolt and automatically I opened the door of my car.

"Run, Max, run!" I said to the cat.

He jumped out of the car, dashed across the street with his body close to the ground like a true feline. The opposite side of the street was empty. There were no cars parked and I could see Max running down the street alone the gutter. He reached the corner of a big boulevard and then dove through the storm drain into the sewer.

My friend came back. I told her that Max had left. She got into the car and we drove away without saying a single word.

In the months that followed, the incident became a symbol to me. I fancied, or perhaps I saw, a weird flicker in Max's eyes when he looked at me before jumping out of the car, and I believed that for an instant that castrated, overweight, and useless pet became a cat.

I told don Juan that I was convinced that when Max had run across the street and plunged into the sewer his 'cat spirit' was impeccable, and that perhaps at no other time in his life was his 'catness' so evident. The impression that the incident left on me was unforgettable.

I told the story to all of my friends. After telling it and retelling it, my identification with the cat became quite pleasurable.

I thought myself to be like Max; overindulgent, domesticated in many ways; and yet I could not help thinking that there was always the possibility of one moment in which the spirit of man might take over my whole being just like the spirit of 'catness' took over Max's bloated and useless body.

Don Juan had liked the story and had made some casual comments about it. He had said that it was not so difficult to let the spirit of man flow and take over;. To sustain it, however, was something that only a warrior could do.

"What about the story of the cats?" I asked.

"You told me you believed that you are taking your chances, like Max," he said.

"I do believe that."

"What I have been trying to tell you is that as a warrior you cannot just believe this and let it go at that. With Max, having to believe means that you accept the fact that his escape might have been a useless outburst. He might have jumped into the sewer and died instantly. He might have drowned or starved to death; or he might have been eaten by rats. A warrior considers all those possibilities and then chooses to believe in accordance with his innermost predilection.

"As a warrior you have to believe that Max made it; that he not only escaped but that he sustained his power. You have to believe it. Let us say that without that belief you have nothing."

The distinction became very clear. I thought I really had chosen to believe that Max had survived; knowing that he was handicapped by a lifetime of soft and pampered living.

"Believing is a cinch," don Juan went on. "Having to believe is something else. In this case, for instance, power gave you a splendid lesson but you chose to use only part of it. If you have to believe, however, you must use all the event."

"I see what you mean," I said.

My mind was in a state of clarity and I thought I was grasping his concepts with no effort at all.

"I am afraid you still do not understand," he said, almost whispering.

He stared at me. I held his look for a moment.

"What about the other cat?" he asked.

"Uh? The other cat?" I repeated involuntarily.

I had forgotten about it. My symbol had rotated around Max. The other cat was of no consequence to me.

"But he is!" don Juan exclaimed when I voiced my thoughts. "Having to believe means that you have to also account for the other cat. The one that went playfully licking the hands that were carrying him to his doom. That was the cat that went to his death trustingly; filled with his cat's judgments.

"You think you are like Max, therefore you have forgotten about the other cat. You do not even know his name. Having to believe means that you must consider everything, and before deciding that you are like Max, you must consider that you may be like the other cat. Instead of running for your life and taking your chances, you may be going to your doom happily; filled with your judgments."

There was an intriguing sadness in his words, or perhaps the sadness was mine. We remained quiet for a long time. Never had it crossed my mind that I might be like the other cat. The thought was very distressing to me.

A mild commotion and the muffled sound of voices suddenly forced me out of my mental deliberations. Policemen were dispersing some people gathered around the man lying on the grass. Someone had propped the man's head on a rolled up jacket. The man was lying parallel to the street. He was facing east. From where I sat I could almost tell that his eyes were open.

Don Juan sighed.

"What a magnificent afternoon," he said, looking at the sky.

"I do not like Mexico City," I said.

"Why not?"

"I hate the smog."

He shook his head rhythmically is if he were agreeing with me.

"I would rather be with you in the desert, or in the mountains," I said.

"If I were you I would never say that," he said.

"I did not mean anything wrong, don Juan."

"We both know that. It is not what you mean that matters, though. A warrior, or any man for that matter, cannot possibly wish he were somewhere else; a warrior because he lives by challenge; an ordinary man because he does not know where his death is going to find him.

"Look at that man over there lying on the grass. What do you think is wrong with him?"

"He is either drunk or ill," I said.

"He is dying!" don Juan said with ultimate conviction. "When we sat down here I caught a glimpse of his death as it circled around him. That is why I told you not to get up. Rain or shine, you can not get up from this bench until the end. This is the omen we have been waiting for. It is late afternoon. Right now the sun is about to set. It is your hour of power. Look! The view of that man is only for us."

He pointed out that from where we sat we had an unobstructed view of the man. A group of curious bystanders were gathered in a half circle on the other side of him opposite us.

The sight of the man lying on the grass became very disturbing to me. He was lean and dark; still young. His black hair was short and curly. His shirt was unbuttoned and his chest was uncovered. He was wearing an orange cardigan sweater with holes in the elbows and some old beat up gray slacks. His shoes, of some undefined faded color, were untied. He was rigid. I could not tell whether or not he was breathing.

I wondered if he were dying as don Juan had said; or was don Juan simply using the event to make a point? My past experiences with him gave me the certainty that somehow he was making everything fit into some mysterious scheme of his.

After a long silence I turned to him. His eyes were closed. He began to talk without opening them.

"That man is about to die now," he said. "You do not believe it, though, do you?"

He opened his eyes and stared at me for a second. His look was so penetrating that it stunned me.

"No. I do not believe it," I said.

I really felt that the whole thing was too easy. We had come to sit in the park, and right there, as if everything were being staged, was a man dying.

"The world adjusts itself to itself," don Juan said after listening to my doubts. "This is not a setup. This is an omen; an act of power.

"The world upheld by reason makes all this into an event that we can watch for a moment on our way to more important things. All we can say about it is that a man is lying on the grass in the park, perhaps drunk.

"The world upheld by will makes it into an act of power which we can see. We can see death whirling around the man setting its hooks deeper and deeper into his luminous fibers. We can see the luminous strings losing their tautness and vanishing one by one.

"Those are the two possibilities opened to us luminous beings. You are somewhere in the middle still wanting to have everything under the rubric of reason.

"And yet, how can you discard the fact that your personal power rounded up an omen? We came to this park after you had found me where I had been waiting for you. You found me by just walking into me: without thinking, or planning, or deliberately using your 'reason'; and after we sat down here to wait for an omen, we became aware of that man. Each of us noticed him in our own way. You with your 'reason'. I with my 'will'.

"That dying man is one of the cubic centimeters of chance that power always makes available to a warrior. The warrior's art is to be perennially fluid in order to pluck it. I have plucked it, but have you?"

I could not answer. I became aware of an immense chasm within myself, and for a moment I was somehow cognizant of the two worlds he was talking about.

"What an exquisite omen this is!" he went on. "And all for you. Power is showing you that death is the indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the awareness of death, everything is ordinary; trivial. It is only because death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery. Power has shown you that.

"All I have done myself is to round up the details of the omen so the direction would be clear to you; but in rounding up the details, I have also shown you that everything I have said to you today is what I have to believe myself because that is the predilection of my spirit."

We looked each other in the eye for a moment.

"I remember a poem that you used to read to me," he said, moving his eyes to the side. "About a man who vowed to die in Paris. How does it go?"

The poem was Cesar Vallejo's "Black Stone on a White Stone." I had read and recited the first two stanzas to don Juan countless times at his request.

The poem summed up an indescribable melancholy for me.

Don Juan whispered that he had to believe that the dying man had had enough personal power to enable him to choose the streets of Mexico City as the place of his death.

"We are back again to the story of the two cats," he said. "We have to believe that Max became aware of what was stalking him and, like that man over there, had enough power at least to choose the place of his end. But then there was the other cat, just like there are other men whose death will encircle them while they are alone, unaware, staring at the walls and ceiling of an ugly barren room.

"That man, on the other hand, is dying where he has always lived, in the streets. Three policemen are his guards of honor. And as he fades away his eyes will catch a last glimpse of the lights in the stores across the street- the cars, the trees, the throngs of people milling around- and his ears will be flooded for the last time with the sounds of traffic and the voices of men and women as they walk by.

"So you see, without an awareness of the presence of our death there is no power, no mystery."

I stared at the man for a long time. He was motionless. Perhaps he was dead. But my disbelief did not matter any longer. Don Juan was right. Having to believe that the world is mysterious and unfathomable was the expression of a warrior's innermost predilection. Without it he had nothing.

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 05 - The Island Of The Tonal.

Don Juan and I met again the next day at the same park around noon. He was still wearing his brown suit. We sat on a bench. He took off his coat, folded it very carefully but with an air of supreme casualness, and laid it on the bench. His casualness was very studied and yet it was completely natural. I caught myself staring at him. He seemed to be aware of the paradox he was presenting to me and smiled. He straightened his necktie. He had on a beige long-sleeved shirt. It fit him very well.

"I still have on my suit because I want to tell you something of great importance," he said, patting me on the shoulder. "You had a good performance yesterday. Now it is time to come to some final agreements."

He paused for a long-moment. He seemed to be preparing a statement. I had a strange feeling in my stomach. My immediate assumption was that he was going to tell me the sorcerers' explanation. He stood up a couple of times and paced back and forth in front of me as if it were difficult to voice what he had in mind.

"Let us go to the restaurant across the street and have a bite to eat," he finally said.

He unfolded his coat, and before he put it on he showed me that it was fully lined.

"It is made to order," he said and smiled as if he were proud of it; as if it mattered.

"I have to call your attention to it, or you would not notice it, and it is very important that you are aware of it. You are aware of everything only when you think you should be. The condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times.

"My suit and all this paraphernalia is important because it represents my condition in life- or rather, the condition of one of the two parts of my totality. This discussion has been pending. I feel that now is the time to have it. It has to be done properly, though, or it will never make sense. I wanted my suit to give you the first clue. I think it has. Now is the time to talk; for in matters of this topic there is no complete understanding without talking."

"What is the topic, don Juan?"

"The totality of oneself," he said.

He stood up abruptly and led me to a restaurant in a large hotel across the street. A hostess with a rather unfriendly disposition gave us a table inside in a back corner. Obviously the choice places were around the windows.

I told don Juan that the woman reminded me of another hostess in a restaurant in Arizona where don Juan and I had once gone to eat. She had asked us before she handed out the menu if we had enough money to pay.

"I do not blame this poor woman either," don Juan said, as if sympathizing with her. "She too, like the other one, is afraid of Mexicans."

He laughed softly. A couple of people at the adjacent tables turned their heads around and looked at us.

Don Juan said that without knowing, or perhaps even in spite of herself, the hostess had given us the best table in the house; a table where we could talk and I could write to my heart's content.

I had just taken my writing pad out of my pocket and put it on the table when the waiter suddenly loomed over us. He also seemed to be in a bad mood. He stood over us with a challenging air.

Don Juan proceeded to order a very elaborate meal for himself. He ordered without looking at the menu- as if he knew it by heart. I was at a loss. The waiter had appeared unexpectedly and I had not had time to read the menu, so I told him that I would have the same.

Don Juan whispered in my ear, "I bet you that they do not have what I have ordered."

He stretched his arms and legs, and told me to relax and sit comfortably because the meal was going to take forever to be prepared.

"You are at a very poignant crossroad," he said. "Perhaps the last one, and also perhaps the most difficult one to understand. Some of the things I am going to point out to you today will probably never be clear. They are not supposed to be clear anyway. So do not be embarrassed or discouraged. All of us are dumb creatures when we join the world of sorcery, and to join it does not in any sense insure us that we will change. Some of us remain dumb until the very end."

I liked it when he included himself among the idiots. I knew that he did not do it out of kindness, but as a didactic device.

"Do not fret if you do not make sense out of what I am going to tell you," he continued. "Considering your temperament, I am afraid that you might knock yourself out trying to understand. Do not. What I am about to say is meant only to point out a direction."

I had a sudden feeling of apprehension. Don Juan's admonitions forced me into an endless speculation. He had warned me on other occasions in very much the same fashion; and every time he had done so, what he was warning me about had turned out to be a devastating issue.

"It makes me very nervous when you talk to me this way," I said.

"I know it," he replied calmly. "I am deliberately trying to get you on your toes. I need your attention; your undivided attention."

He paused and looked at me, I laughed nervously and involuntarily. I knew that he was stretching the dramatic possibilities of the situation as far as he could.

"I am not telling you all this for effect," he said, as if he had read my thoughts. "I am simply giving you time to make the proper adjustments."

At that moment the waiter stopped at our table to announce that they did not have what we had ordered. Don Juan laughed out loud and ordered tortillas and beans. The waiter chuckled scornfully and said that they did not serve them, and suggested steak or chicken. We settled for some soup.

We ate in silence. I did not like the soup and could not finish it, but don Juan ate all of his.

"I have put on my suit," he said all of a sudden, "in order to tell you about something; something you already know but which needs to be clarified if it is going to be effective. I have waited until now because Genaro feels that you have to be not only willing to undertake the road of knowledge, but your efforts by themselves must be impeccable enough to make you worthy of that knowledge. You have done well. Now I will tell you the sorcerers' explanation."

He paused again, rubbed his cheeks, and played with his tongue inside his mouth as if he were feeling his teeth.

"I am going to tell you about the tonal and the nagual" he said and looked at me piercingly.

This was the first time in our association that he had used those two terms. I was vaguely familiar with them through the anthropological literature on the cultures of central Mexico.

I knew that the 'tonal' (pronounced, toh-na'hl) was thought to be a kind of guardian spirit, usually an animal, that a child obtained at birth and with which he had intimate ties with for the rest of his life.

'Nagual' (pronounced, nah-wa'hl) was the name given to the animal into which sorcerers could allegedly transform themselves; or to the sorcerer that elicited such a transformation.

"This is my tonal" don Juan said, rubbing his hands on his chest.

"Your suit?"

"No. My person."

He pounded his chest and his thighs and the side of his ribs.

"My tonal is all this."

He explained that every human being had two sides; two separate entities; two counterparts which became operative at the moment of birth. One was called the 'tonal' and the other the 'nagual'.

I told him what anthropologists knew about the two concepts. He let me speak without interrupting me.

"Well, whatever you may think you know about them is pure nonsense," he said. "I base this statement on the fact that whatever I am telling you about the tonal and the nagual could not possibly have been told to you before. Any idiot would know that you know nothing about them because in order to be acquainted with them you would have to be a sorcerer, and you are not. Or you would have had to talk about them with a sorcerer, and you have not. So disregard everything you have heard before because it is inapplicable."

"It was only a comment," I said.

He raised his brows in a comical gesture.

"Your comments are out of order," he said. "This time I need your undivided attention since I am going to acquaint you with the tonal and the nagual. Sorcerers have a special and unique interest in that knowledge. I would say that the tonal and the nagual are in the exclusive realm of men of knowledge. In your case, this is the lid that closes everything I have taught you. Thus I have waited until now to talk about them.

"The tonal is not an animal that guards a person. I would rather say that it is a guardian that could be represented as an animal. But that is not the important point."

He smiled and winked at me.

"I am using your own words now," he said. "The tonal is the social person."

He laughed, I supposed, at the sight of my bewilderment.

"The tonal is rightfully so, a protector; a guardian- a guardian that most of the time turns into a guard."

I fumbled with my notebook. I was trying to pay attention to what he was saying. He laughed and mimicked my nervous movements.

"The tonal is the organizer of the world," he proceeded. "Perhaps the best way of describing its monumental work is to say that on its shoulders rests the task of setting the chaos of the world in order. It is not farfetched to maintain, as sorcerers do, that everything we know and do as men is the work of the tonal.

"At this moment, for instance, what is engaged in trying to make sense out of our conversation is your tonal. Without it there would be only weird sounds and grimaces, and you would not understand a thing of what I am saying.

"I would say then that the tonal is a guardian that protects something priceless; our very being. Therefore an inherent quality of the tonal is to be cagey and jealous of its doings. And since its doings are by far the most important part of our lives, it is no wonder that it eventually changes in every one of us from a guardian into a guard."

He stopped and asked me if I had understood. I automatically nodded my head affirmatively, and he smiled with an air of incredulity.

"A guardian is broad-minded and understanding," he explained. "A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante; narrow-minded and most of the time despotic. I say then that the tonal in all of us has been made into a petty and despotic guard when it should be a broad-minded guardian."

I definitely was not following the trend of his explanation. I heard and wrote down every word and yet I seemed to be stuck with some internal dialogue of my own.

"It is very hard for me to follow your point," I said.

"If you did not get hooked on talking to yourself, you would have no quarrels," he said cuttingly.

His remark threw me into a long explanatory statement. I finally caught myself and apologized for my insistence on defending myself.

He smiled and made a gesture that seemed to indicate that my attitude had not really annoyed him.

"The tonal is everything we are," he proceeded. "Name it! Anything we have a word for is the tonal. And since the tonal is its own doings, then everything, obviously, has to fall under its domain."

I reminded him that he had said that the 'tonal' was the social person, a term which I myself had used with him to mean a human being as the end result of socialization processes. I pointed out that if the 'tonal' was that product, it could not be everything, as he had said, because the world around us was not the product of socialization.

Don Juan reminded me that my argument had no basis for him, and that long before he had already made the point that there was no world at large but only a description of the world which we had learned to visualize and take for granted.

"The tonal is everything we know," he said. "I think this in itself is enough reason for the tonal to be such an overpowering affair."

He paused for a moment. He seemed to be definitely waiting for comments or questions, but I had none. Yet I felt obligated to voice a question and struggled to formulate an appropriate one.

I failed. I felt that the admonitions with which he had opened our conversation had perhaps served as a deterrent to any inquiry on my part. I felt strangely numb. I could not concentrate and order my thoughts. In fact I felt and knew without the shadow of a doubt that I was incapable of thinking. And yet I knew this without thinking; if that were at all possible.

I looked at don Juan. He was staring at the middle part of my body. He lifted his eyes and my clarity of mind returned instantly.

"The tonal is everything we know," he repeated slowly. "And that includes not only us as persons, but everything in our world. It can be said that the tonal is everything that meets the eye.

"We begin to groom it at the moment of birth. The moment we take the first gasp of air we also breathe in power for the tonal. So it is proper to say that the tonal of a human being is intimately tied to his birth.

"You must remember this point. It is of great importance in understanding all this. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death."

I wanted to recapitulate all the points that he had made. I went as far as opening my mouth to ask him to repeat the salient points of our conversation, but to my amazement I could not vocalize my words. I was experiencing a most curious incapacity. My words were heavy and I had no control over that sensation.

I looked at don Juan to signal him that I could not talk. He was again staring at the area around my stomach.

He lifted his eyes and asked me how I felt. Words poured out of me as if I had been unplugged. I told him that I had been having the peculiar sensation of not being able to talk or think, and yet my thoughts had been crystal clear.

"Your thoughts have been crystal clear?" he asked.

I realized then that the clarity had not pertained to my thoughts, but to my perception of the world.

"Are you doing something to me, don Juan?" I asked.

"I am trying to convince you that your comments are not necessary," he said and laughed.

"You mean you do not want me to ask questions?"

"No, no. Ask anything you want, but do not let your attention waver."

I had to admit that I had been distracted by the immensity of the topic.

"I still cannot understand, don Juan, what you mean by the statement that the tonal is everything," I said after a moment's pause.

"The tonal is what makes the world."

"Is the tonal the creator of the world?"

Don Juan scratched his temples.

"The tonal makes the world only in a manner of speaking. It cannot create or change anything, and yet it makes the world because its function is to judge, and assess, and witness. I say that the tonal makes the world because it witnesses and assesses it according to tonal rules. In a very strange manner, the tonal is a creator that does not create a thing. In other words, the tonal makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."

He hummed a popular tune, beating the rhythm with his fingers on the side of his chair. His eyes were shining. They seemed to sparkle. He chuckled, shaking his head.

"You are not following me," he said, smiling.

"I am. I have no problems," I said, but I did not sound very convincing.

"The tonal is an island," he explained. "The best way of describing it is to say that the tonal is this."

He ran his hand over the table top.

"We can say that the tonal is like the top of this table. An island. And on this island we have everything. This island is, in fact, the world.

"There is a personal tonal for every one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at any given time which we can call the tonal of the times."

He pointed to the rows of tables in the restaurant.

"Look! Every table has the same configuration. Certain items are present on all of them. They are, however, individually different from each other. Some tables are more crowded than others. They have different food on them, different plates, different atmosphere, yet we have to admit that all the tables in this restaurant are very alike.

The same thing happens with the tonal. We can say that the tonal of the times is what makes us alike in the same way it makes all the tables in this restaurant alike. Each table separately, nevertheless, is an individual case just like the personal tonal of each of us. But the important factor to keep in mind is that everything we know about ourselves and about our world is on the island of the tonal. See what I mean?"

"If the tonal is everything we know about ourselves and our world, what then is the nagual?"

"The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description: no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge."

"That is a contradiction, don Juan. In my opinion, if it can not be felt or described or named, it can not exist."

"It is a contradiction only in your opinion. I warned you before, do not knock yourself out trying to understand this."

"Would you say that the nagual is the mind?"

"No. The mind is an item on the table. The mind is part of the tonal. Let us say that the mind is the chili sauce."

He took a bottle of sauce and placed it in front of me.

"Is the nagual the soul?"

"No. The soul is also on the table. Let us say that the soul is the ashtray."

"Is it the thoughts of men?"

"No. Thoughts are also on the table. Thoughts are like the silverware."

He picked up a fork and placed it next to the chili sauce and the ashtray.

"Is it a state of grace? Heaven?"

"Not that either. That, whatever it might be, is also part of the tonal. It is, let us say, the napkin."

I went on giving possible ways of describing what he was alluding to: pure intellect, psyche, energy, vital force, immortality, life principle. For each thing I named he found an item on the table to serve as a counterpart and shoved it in front of me until he had all the objects on the table stashed in one pile.

Don Juan seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He giggled and rubbed his hands every time I named another possibility.

"Is the nagual the Supreme Being; the Almighty, God?" I asked.

"No. God is also on the table. Let us say that God is the tablecloth."

He made a joking gesture of pulling the tablecloth in order to stack it up with the rest of the items he had put in front of me.

"But, are you saying that God does not exist?"

"No. I did not say that. All I said was that the nagual was not God because God is an item of our personal tonal and of the tonal of the times. The tonal is, as I have already said, everything we think the world is composed of, including God, of course. God has no more importance other than being a part of the tonal of our time."

"In my understanding, don Juan, God is everything. Are we not talking about the same thing?"

"No. God is only everything you can think of, therefore, properly speaking, he is only another item on the island. God cannot be witnessed at will, he can only be talked about.

"The nagual, on the other hand, is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about."

"If the nagual is not any of the things I have mentioned," I said, "perhaps you can tell me about its location. Where is it?"

Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table. He swept his hand, as if with the back of it he were cleaning an imaginary surface that went beyond the edges of the table.

"The nagual is there," he said. "There, surrounding the island. The nagual is there, where power hovers.

"We sense, from the moment we are born, that there are two parts to us. At the time of birth, and for a while after, we are all nagual. We sense, then, that in order to function we need a counterpart to what we have. The tonal is missing and that gives us, from the very beginning, a feeling of incompleteness.

"Then the tonal starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to our functioning; so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual. It overwhelms it. From the moment we become all tonal, we do nothing else but to increment that old feeling of incompleteness which accompanies us from the moment of our birth, and which tells us constantly that there is another part to give us completeness.

"From the moment we become all tonal we begin making pairs. We sense our two sides, but we always represent them with items of the tonal. We say that the two parts of us are the soul and the body. Or mind and matter. Or good and evil. God and Satan.

"We never realize, however, that we are merely pairing things on the island, very much like pairing coffee and tea, or bread and tortillas, or chili and mustard. I tell you, we are weird animals. We get carried away, and in our madness we believe ourselves to be making perfect sense."

Don Juan stood up and addressed me as if he were an orator. He pointed his index finger at me and made his head shiver.

"Man does not move between good and evil," he said in a hilariously rhetorical tone, grabbing the salt and pepper shakers in both hands. "His true movement is between negativeness and positiveness."

He dropped the salt and pepper and clutched a knife and fork.

"You are wrong. There is no movement," he continued as if he were answering himself. "Man is only mind!"

He took the bottle of sauce and held it up. Then he put it down.

"As you can see," he said softly, "we can easily replace chili sauce for mind and end up saying, 'Man is only chili sauce!' Doing that will not make us more demented than we already are."

"I am afraid I have not asked the right question," I said. "Maybe we could arrive at a better understanding if I asked what one can specifically find in that area beyond the island?"

"There is no way of answering that. If I would say, 'nothing', I would only make the nagual part of the tonal. All I can say is that there, beyond the island, one finds the nagual"

"But, when you call it the nagual, are you not also placing it on the island?"

"No. I named it only because I wanted to make you aware of it."

"All right! But becoming aware of it is the step that has turned the nagual into a new item of my tonal"

"I am afraid you do not understand. I have named the tonal and the nagual as a true pair. That is all I have done."

He reminded me that once while trying to explain to him my insistence on meaning, I had discussed the idea that children might not be capable of comprehending the difference between 'father' and 'mother' until they were quite developed in terms of handling meaning. And that they would perhaps believe that it might be that 'father' wears pants and 'mother' skirts, or other differences dealing with hairstyle, or size of body, or items of clothing.

"We certainly do the same thing with the two parts of us," he said. "We sense that there is another side to us. But when we try to pin down that other side the tonal gets hold of the baton, and as a director it is quite petty and jealous. It dazzles us with its cunningness and forces us to obliterate the slightest inkling of the other part of the true pair, the nagual."

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 06 - The Day Of The Tonal.

As we left the restaurant I told don Juan that he had been correct in warning me about the difficulty of the topic, and that my intellectual prowess was inadequate to grasp his concepts and explanations. I suggested that perhaps if I would go to my hotel and read my notes, my comprehension of the subject might improve. He tried to put me at ease. He said that I was worrying about words. While he was speaking I experienced a shiver, and for an instant I sensed that there was indeed another area within me.

I mentioned to don Juan that I was having some inexplicable feelings. My statement apparently aroused his curiosity. I told him that I had had the same feelings before, and that they seemed to be momentary lapses; interruptions in my flow of awareness. They always manifested themselves as a jolt in my body followed by the sensation that I was suspended in something.

We headed for downtown, walking leisurely. Don Juan asked me to relate all the details of my lapses. I had a hard time describing them beyond the point of calling them moments of forgetfulness, or absent-mindedness, or not watching what I was doing.

He patiently rebuffed me. He pointed out that I was a demanding person, had an excellent memory, and was very careful in my actions. It had occurred to me at first that those peculiar lapses were associated with stopping the internal dialogue, but I also had had them when I had talked to myself extensively. They seemed to stem from an area independent of everything I knew.

Don Juan patted me on the back. He smiled with apparent delight.

"You are finally beginning to make real connections," he said.

I asked him to explain his cryptic statement, but he abruptly stopped our conversation and signaled me to follow him to a small park in front of a church.

"This is the end of our journey to downtown," he said and sat down on a bench. "Right here we have an ideal spot to watch people. There are some who walk by on the street and others who come to church. From here we can see everyone."

He pointed to a wide business street and to the gravel walk leading to the steps of the church. Our bench was located midway between the church and the street.

"This is my very favorite bench," he said, caressing the wood.

He winked at me and added with a grin, "It likes me. That is why no one was sitting on it. It knew I was coming."

"The bench knew that?"

"No! Not the bench. My nagual."

"Does the nagual have consciousness? Is it aware of things?"

"Of course. It is aware of everything. That is why I am interested in your account. What you call lapses and feelings is the nagual. In order to talk about it we must borrow from the island of the tonal. Therefore it is more convenient not to explain it but to simply recount its effects."

I wanted to say something else about those peculiar feelings, but he hushed me.

"No more. Today is not the day of the nagual, today is the day of the tonal" he said. "I put on my suit because today I am all tonal."

He stared at me. I was about to tell him that the subject was proving to be more difficult than anything he had ever explained to me. He seemed to have anticipated my words.

"It is difficult," he continued. "I know it. But considering that this is the final lid- the last stage of what I have been teaching you- it is not too farfetched to say that it envelops everything I mentioned since the first day we met."

We remained quiet for a long while. I felt that I had to wait for him to resume his explanation, but I had a sudden attack of apprehension and hurriedly asked, "Are the nagual and the tonal within ourselves?"

He looked at me piercingly.

"Very difficult question," he said. "You yourself would say that they are within ourselves. I myself would say that they are not, but neither of us would be right. The tonal of your time calls for you to maintain that everything dealing with your feelings and thoughts takes place within yourself. The sorcerers' tonal says the opposite: everything is outside. Who is right? No one. Inside, outside, it does not really matter."

I raised a point. I said that when he talked about the 'tonal' and the 'nagual' it sounded as if there was still a third part. He had said that the tonal 'forces us' to perform acts. I asked him to tell me who he was referring to as being forced.

He did not answer me directly.

"To explain all this is not that simple," he said. "No matter how clever the checkpoints of the tonal are, the fact of the matter is that the nagual surfaces. Its coming to the surface is always inadvertent, though. The tonal's great art is to suppress any manifestation of the nagual in such a manner that even if its presence should be the most obvious thing in the world, it is unnoticeable."

"For whom is it unnoticeable?"

He chuckled, shaking his head up and down. I pressed him for an answer.

"For the tonal" he said. "I am speaking about it exclusively. I may go around in circles, but that should not surprise or annoy you. I warned you about the difficulty of understanding what I have to tell. I went through all that rigamarole because my tonal is aware that it is speaking about itself.

"In other words, my tonal is using itself in order to understand the information I want your tonal to be clear about. Let us say that the tonal, since it is keenly aware of how taxing it is to speak of itself, has created the terms 'I,' 'myself,' and so forth as a balance and thanks to them it can talk with other tonals, or with itself, about itself.

"Now when I say that the tonal forces us to do something, I do not mean that there is a third party there. Obviously it forces itself to follow its own judgments.

"On certain occasions, however, or under certain special circumstances, something in the tonal itself becomes aware that there is more to us. It is like a voice that comes from the depths; the voice of the nagual. You see, the totality of ourselves is a natural condition which the tonal cannot obliterate altogether, and there are moments, especially in the life of a warrior, when the totality becomes apparent. At those moments one can surmise and assess what we really are.

"I was concerned with those jolts you have had because that is the way the nagual surfaces. At those moments the tonal becomes aware of the totality of oneself. It is always a jolt because that awareness disrupts the lull. I call that awareness the totality of the being that is going to die. The idea is that at the moment of death the other member of the true pair, the nagual, becomes fully operative and the awareness and memories and perceptions stored in our calves and thighs, in our back and shoulders and neck, begin to expand and disintegrate. Like the beads of an endless broken necklace, they fall asunder without the binding force of life."

He looked at me. His eyes were peaceful. I felt ill at ease, stupid.

"The totality of ourselves is a very tacky affair," he said. "We need only a very small portion of it to fulfill the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves. A sorcerer asks the question, 'If we are going to die with the totality of ourselves, why not, then, live with that totality?'"

He signaled me with his head to watch the scores of people that went by.

"They are all tonal" he said. "I am going to single some of them out so your tonal will assess them, and in assessing them it will assess itself."

He directed my attention to two old ladies that had emerged from the church. They stood at the top of the limestone steps for a moment and then began to walk down with infinite care, resting on every step.

"Watch those two women very carefully," he said. "But do not see them as persons, or as faces that hold things in common with us. See them as tonals"

The two women got to the bottom of the steps. They moved as if the rough gravel were marbles and they were about to roll and lose their balance on them. They walked arm in arm, propping each other up with the weight of their bodies.

"Look at them!" don Juan said in a low voice. "Those women are the best example of the most miserable tonal one can find."

I noticed that the two women were small-boned but fat. They were perhaps in their early fifties. They had a painful look in their faces, as if walking down the church steps had been beyond their strength.

They were in front of us. They vacillated for a moment, and then they came to a halt. There was one more step on the gravel walk.

"Watch your step, ladies," don Juan shouted as he stood up dramatically.

The women looked at him; apparently confused by his sudden outburst.

"My mom broke her hip right there the other day," he added and dashed over to help them.

They thanked him profusely and he advised them that if they ever lost their balance and fell down, they had to remain motionless on the spot until the ambulance came. His tone was sincere and convincing. The women crossed themselves.

Don Juan sat down again. His eyes were beaming. He spoke softly.

"Those women are not that old and their bodies are not that weak, and yet they are decrepit. Everything about them is dreary: their clothes, their smell, their attitude. Why do you think that is so?"

"Maybe they were born that way," I said.

"No one is born that way. We make ourselves that way. The tonal of those women is weak and timid.

"I said that today was going to be the day of the tonal. I meant that today I want to deal with it exclusively. I also said that I had put on my suit for that specific purpose. With it I wanted to show you that a warrior treats his tonal in a very special manner. I have pointed out to you that my suit has been made to order, and that everything I have on today fits me to perfection. It is not my vanity that I wanted to show, but my warrior's spirit; my warrior's tonal.

"Those two women gave you your first view of the tonal today. Life can be as merciless with you as it is with them if you are careless with your tonal. I put myself as the counterpoint. If you understand correctly I should not need to stress this point."

I had a sudden attack of uncertainty and asked him to spell out what I should have understood.

I must have sounded desperate. He laughed out loud.

"Look at that young man in green pants and a pink shirt," don Juan whispered pointing to a very thin and very dark complexioned, sharp-featured young man who was standing almost in front of us.

He seemed to be undecided whether to go towards the church or towards the street. Twice he raised his hand in the direction of the church as though he were talking to himself and was about to start moving towards it. Then he stared at me with a blank expression.

"Look at the way he is dressed," don Juan said in a whisper. "Look at those shoes!"

The young man's clothes were tattered and wrinkled, and his shoes were in absolute pieces.

"He is obviously very poor," I said.

"Is that all you can say about him?" he asked.

I enumerated a series of reasons that might have accounted for the young man's shabbiness: poor health, bad luck, indolence, indifference to his personal appearance, or the chance that he may have just been released from prison.

Don Juan said that I was merely speculating, and that he was not interested in justifying anything by suggesting that the man was a victim of unconquerable forces.

"Maybe he is a secret agent made to look like a bum," I said jokingly.

The young man walked away towards the street with a disjointed gait.

"He is not made to look like a bum. He is a bum," don Juan said. "Look how weak his body is. His arms and legs are thin. He can hardly walk. No one can pretend to look that way. There is something definitely wrong with him; not his circumstances though. I have to stress again that I want you to see that man as a tonal"

"What does it entail to see a man as a tonal?"

"It entails to cease judging him in a moral sense, or excusing him on the grounds that he is like a leaf at the mercy of the wind. In other words, it entails seeing a man without thinking that he is hopeless or helpless.

"You know exactly what I am talking about. You can assess that young man without condemning or forgiving him."

"He drinks too much," I said.

My statement was not volitional. I just made it without really knowing why. For an instant I even felt that someone standing behind me had voiced the words. I was moved to explain that my statement was another of my speculations.

"That was not the case," don Juan said. "Your tone of voice had a certainty that you lacked before. You did not say, 'Maybe he is a drunkard.'"

I felt embarrassed although I could not exactly determine why. Don Juan laughed.

"You saw through the man," he said. "That was seeing. Seeing is like that. Statements are made with great certainty, and one does not know how it happened.

"You know that young man's tonal was shot, but you do not know how you know it."

I had to admit that somehow I had had that impression.

"You are right," don Juan said. "It does not really matter that he is young. He is as decrepit as the two women. Youth is in no way a barrier against the deterioration of the tonal.

"You thought that there might be a great many reasons for that man's condition. I find that there is only one; his tonal. It is not that his tonal is weak because he drinks. It is the other way around. He drinks because his tonal is weak. That weakness forces him to be what he is. But the same thing happens to all of us in one form or another."

"But are you not also justifying his behavior by saying that it is his tonal?"

"I am giving you an explanation that you have never encountered before. It is not a justification or a condemnation though. That young man's tonal is weak and timid. And yet he is not unique. All of us are more or less in the same boat."

At that moment a very large man passed in front of us heading towards the church. He was wearing an expensive dark gray business suit and was carrying a briefcase. The collar of his shirt was unbuttoned and his necktie loose. He was sweating profusely. He had a very light complexion which made the perspiration all the more obvious.

"Watch him!" don Juan ordered me.

The man's steps were small but heavy. There was a wobbling quality to his walking. He did not go up to the church. He circumvented it and disappeared behind it.

"There is no need to treat the body in such an awful manner," don Juan said with a note of scorn. "But the sad fact is that all of us have learned to perfection how to make our tonal weak. I have called that indulging."

He put his hand on my notebook and did not let me write any more. His rationale was that as long as I kept on taking notes I was incapable of concentrating. He suggested I should relax, shut off the internal dialogue, and let go; merging with the person being observed.

I asked him to explain what he meant by 'merging.' He said there was no way to explain it; that it was something that the body felt or did when put in observational contact with other bodies. He then clarified the issue by saying that in the past he had called that process 'seeing' and that it consisted of a lull of true silence within followed by an outward elongation of something in the self; an elongation that met and merged with the other body, or with anything within one's field of awareness.

At that point I wanted to get back to my writing pad, but he stopped me and began to single out different people from the crowd that passed by.

He pointed out dozens of persons covering a wide range of types among men, women and children of various ages. Don Juan said that he had selected persons whose weak 'tonal' could fit into a categorization scheme, and thus he had acquainted me with a preconceived variety of indulging.

I did not remember all the people he had pointed out and discussed. I complained that if I had taken notes I could have at least sketched out the intricacies of his schemata on indulging. As it was he did not want to repeat it, or perhaps he did not remember it either.

He laughed and said that he did not remember it, because in the life of a sorcerer it was the 'nagual' that was accountable for creativity.

He looked at the sky and said that it was getting late, and that from that moment on we were going to change direction. Instead of weak 'tonals' we were going to wait for the appearance of a 'proper tonal'. He added that only a warrior had a 'proper tonal', and that the average man, at best, could have a 'right tonal'.

After a few minutes' wait he slapped his thigh and chuckled.

"Look who is coming now," he said, pointing to the street with a movement of his chin. "It is as if they were made to order."

I saw three male Indians approaching. They had on some short brown woolen ponchos, white pants that came to their mid calf, long-sleeved white tops, dirty worn-out sandals, and old straw hats. Each of them carried a bundle tied to his back.

Don Juan stood up and went to meet them. He spoke to them. They seemed surprised and surrounded him. They smiled at him. He was apparently telling them something about me. The three of them turned around and smiled at me. They were about ten or twelve feet away. I listened carefully but I could not hear what they were saying.

Don Juan reached in his pocket and handed them some bills. They appeared to be pleased. They moved their feet nervously. I liked them very much. They looked like children. All of them had small white teeth and very pleasing mild features.

One, by all appearances the oldest, had whiskers. His eyes were tired but very kind. He took off his hat and came closer to the bench. The others followed him. The three of them greeted me in unison. We shook hands. Don Juan told me to give them some money. They thanked me, and after a polite silence they said good-by. Don Juan sat back down on the bench and we watched them disappear in the crowd.

I told don Juan that for some strange reason I had liked them very much.

"It is not so strange," he said. "You must have felt that their tonal is just right. It is right, but not for our time.

"You probably felt they were like children. They are. And that is very tough. I understand them better than you, thus I could not help but feel a tinge of sadness. Indians are like dogs, they have nothing. But that is the nature of their fortune and I should not feel sad. My sadness, of course, is my own way of indulging."

"Where are they from, don Juan?"

"From the Sierras. They have come here to seek their fortune. They want to become merchants. They are brothers. I told them that I also came from the Sierras and I am a merchant myself. I said that you were my partner. The money we gave them was a token. A warrior should give tokens like that all the time. They no doubt need the money, but need should not be an essential consideration for a token. The thing to look for is feeling. I personally was moved by those three.

"Indians are the losers of our time. Their downfall began with the Spaniards, and now under the reign of their descendants the Indians have lost everything. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Indians have lost their tonal"

"Is that a metaphor, don Juan?"

"No. It is a fact. The tonal is very vulnerable. It cannot withstand maltreatment. The white man, from the day he set foot on this land, has systematically destroyed not only the Indian tonal of the time, but also the personal tonal of every Indian. One can easily surmise that for the poor average Indian the reign of the white man has been sheer hell. And yet the irony is that for another kind of Indian it has been sheer bliss."

"Who are you talking about? What kind of Indian is that?"

"The sorcerer. For the sorcerer, the Conquest was the challenge of a lifetime. They were the only ones who were not destroyed by it. They adapted to it and used it to their ultimate advantage."

"How was that possible, don Juan? I was under the impression that the Spaniards left no stone unturned."

"Let us say that they turned over all the stones that were within the limits of their own tonal. In the Indian life, however, there were things that were incomprehensible to the white man. Those things he did not even notice. Perhaps it was the sheer luck of the sorcerers or perhaps it was their knowledge that saved them. After the tonal of the time and the personal tonal of every Indian was obliterated, the sorcerers found themselves holding on to the only thing left uncontested; the nagual.

"In other words, their tonal took refuge in their nagual. This could not have happened had it not been for the excruciating conditions of a vanquished people. The men of knowledge of today are the product of those conditions, and are the ultimate connoisseurs of the nagual since they were left there thoroughly alone. There, the white man has never ventured. In fact, he does not even have the idea it exists."

I felt compelled at that point to present an argument. I sincerely contended that in European thought we had accounted for what he called the 'nagual'.

I brought in the concept of the Transcendental Ego, or the unobserved observer present in all our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. I explained to don Juan that the individual could perceive or intuit himself as a self through the Transcendental Ego because this was the only thing capable of judgment; capable of disclosing reality within the realm of its consciousness.

Don Juan was unruffled. He laughed.

"Disclosing reality," he said, mimicking me. "That is the tonal."

I argued that the 'tonal' may be called the Empirical Ego found in one's passing stream of consciousness or experience, while the Transcendental Ego was found behind that stream.

"Watching, I suppose," he said mockingly.

"That is right. Watching itself," I said.

"I hear you talking," he said. "But you are saying nothing. The nagual is not experience or intuition or consciousness. Those terms and everything else you may care to say are only items on the island of the tonal. The nagual, on the other hand, is only effect. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit. I have said that the nagual is where power hovers.

"That was only a way of alluding to it. By reasons of its effect, perhaps, the nagual can be best understood in terms of power. For instance, when you felt numb and could not talk earlier today, I was actually soothing you. That is, my nagual was acting upon you."

"How was that possible, don Juan?"

"You will not believe this, but no one knows how. All I know is that I wanted your undivided attention, and then my nagual went to work on you. I know that much because I can witness its effect, but I do not know how it works."

He was quiet for a while. I wanted to keep on the same topic. I attempted to ask a question. He silenced me.

"One can say that the nagual accounts for creativity," he finally said and looked at me piercingly. "The nagual is the only part of us that can create."

He remained quiet, looking at me. I felt he was definitely leading me into an area I had wished he would elucidate further. He had said that the 'tonal' did not create anything, but only witnessed and assessed. I asked how he explained the fact that we construct superb structures and machines.

"That is not creativity," he said. "That is only molding. We can mold anything with our hands; personally or in conjunction with the hands of other tonals. A group of tonals can mold anything; superb structures as you said."

"But what is creativity then, don Juan?"

He stared at me, squinting his eyes. He chuckled softly, lifted his right hand over his head and twisted his wrist with a sharp jerk, as if he were turning a door knob.

"Creativity is this," he said and brought his hand with a cupped palm to the level of my eyes.

It took me an incredibly long time to focus my eyes on his hand. I felt that a transparent membrane was holding my whole body in a fixed position, and that I had to break it in order to place my sight on his hand.

I struggled until beads of perspiration ran into my eyes. Finally I heard or felt a pop, and my eyes and head jerked free.

On his right palm there was the most curious rodent I had ever seen. It looked like a bushy-tailed squirrel. The tail, however, was more like a porcupine's. It had stiff quills.

"Touch it!" don Juan said softly.

I automatically obeyed him and ran my finger on its soft back. Don Juan brought his hand closer to my eyes and then I noticed something that threw me into nervous spasms. The squirrel had eyeglasses and big teeth.

"It looks like a Japanese," I said and began to laugh hysterically.

The rodent then started to grow in don Juan's palm. And while my eyes were still filled with tears of laughter, the rodent became so enormous that it disappeared. It literally went out of the frame of my vision. It happened so rapidly that I was caught in the middle of a spasm of laughter. When I looked again, or when I wiped my eyes and focused them properly, I was looking at don Juan. He was sitting on the bench, and I was standing in front of him although I did not remember having stood up.

For a moment my nervousness was uncontainable. Don Juan calmly got up, forced me to sit, propped my chin between the bicep and forearm of his left arm and hit me on the very top of my head with the knuckles of his right hand. The effect was like the jolt of an electric current. It calmed me down immediately.

There were so many things that I wanted to ask, but my words could not wade through all those thoughts. I then became keenly aware that I had lost control over my vocal cords. I did not want to struggle to speak, however, and leaned against the back of the bench. Don Juan said forcefully that I had to pull myself together and stop indulging. I felt a bit dizzy. He imperatively ordered me to write my notes, and handed me my pad and pencil after picking them up from underneath the bench.

I made a supreme effort to say something and again I had the clear sensation that a membrane was enveloping me. I puffed and groaned for a moment, while don Juan laughed, until I heard or felt another pop.

I began to write immediately. Don Juan spoke as if he were dictating to me.

"One of the acts of a warrior is never to let anything affect him," he said. "Thus a warrior may be seeing the devil himself, but he will not let anyone know that. The control of a warrior has to be impeccable."

He waited until I had finished writing and then asked me laughingly, "Did you get all that?"

I suggested that we should go to a restaurant and have dinner. I was famished. He said that we had to stay until the 'proper tonal' appeared. He added in a serious tone that if the 'proper tonal' did not come that day we had to remain on the bench until it cared to show up.

"What is a proper tonal?" I asked.

"A tonal that is just right, balanced and harmonious. You are supposed to find one today- or rather your power is supposed to bring one to us."

"But how can I tell it apart from other tonals?"

"Never mind that. I will point it out to you."

"What is it like, don Juan?"

"Hard to tell. It depends on you. This is a show for you, therefore you will set up those conditions yourself."

"How?"

"I do not know that. Your power- your nagual will do that.

"There are roughly speaking, two sides to every tonal. One is the outer part: the fringe; the surface of the island. That is the part related to action and acting; the rugged side. The other part is 'decision and judgment'- the inner tonal- softer, more delicate and more complex.

"The proper tonal is a tonal where the two levels are in perfect harmony and balance."

Don Juan stopped talking. It was fairly dark by then and I had a hard time taking notes. He told me to stretch and relax. He said that it had been quite an exhausting day but very prolific and that he was sure the proper tonal would show up.

Dozens of people went by. We sat in a relaxed silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Then don Juan stood up abruptly.

"By golly you have done it! Look what is coming there. A girl!"

He pointed with a nod of his head to a young woman who was crossing the park and was approaching the vicinity of our bench. Don Juan said that that young woman was the 'proper tonal' and that if she would stop to talk to either one of us it would be an extraordinary omen and we would have to do whatever she wanted.

I could not clearly distinguish the young woman's features, although there was still enough light. She came within a couple of feet, but went by without looking at us. Don Juan ordered me in a whisper to get up and go talk to her.

I ran after her and asked for directions. I got very close to her. She was young, perhaps in her mid-twenties, of medium height, very attractive and well-groomed. Her eyes were clear and peaceful. She smiled at me as I spoke. There was something winning about her. I liked her as much as I had liked the three Indians.

I went back to the bench and sat down.

"Is she a warrior?" I asked.

"Not quite," don Juan said. "Your power is not that keen yet to bring a warrior. But she is a just right tonal. One that could turn into a proper tonal. Warriors come from that stock."

His statements aroused my curiosity. I asked him if women could be warriors. He looked at me; apparently baffled by my question.

"Of course they can," he said, "and they are even better equipped for the path of knowledge than men. But then men are a bit more resilient. I would say, however, that all in all, women have a slight advantage."

I said that it puzzled me that we had never talked about women in relation to his knowledge.

"You are a man," he said, "therefore I use the masculine gender when I talk to you. That is all. The rest is the same."

I wanted to question him further but he made a gesture to close the topic. He looked up. The sky was almost black. The banks of clouds looked extremely dark. There were still, however, some areas where the clouds were slightly orange.

"The end of the day is your best time," don Juan said. "The appearance of that young woman at the very edge of the day is an omen. We were talking about the tonal, therefore it is an omen about your tonal."

"What does the omen mean, don Juan?"

"It means that you have very little time left to organize your arrangements. Any arrangements that you might have constructed have to be viable arrangements because you do not have time to make new ones. Your arrangements must work now or they are not arrangements at all.

"I suggest that when you go back home you check your lines and make sure they are strong. You will need them."

"What is going to happen to me, don Juan?"

"Years ago you bid for power. You have followed the hardships of learning faithfully, without fretting or rushing. You are now at the edge of the day."

"What does that mean?"

"For a proper tonal everything on the island of the tonal is a challenge. Another way of saying it is that for a warrior everything in this world is a challenge. The greatest challenge of all, of course, is his bid for power. But power comes from the nagual, and when a warrior finds himself at the edge of the day it means that the hour of the nagual is approaching; the warrior's hour of power."

"I still do not understand the meaning of all this, don Juan. Does it mean that I am going to die soon?"

"If you are stupid, you will," he retorted cuttingly. "But putting it in milder terms it means that you are about to shiver in your pants. You bid for power once and that bidding is irreversible. I would not say that you are about to fulfill your destiny because there is no destiny. The only thing that one can say then is that you are about to fulfill your power. The omen was clear. That young woman came to you at the edge of the day. You have little time left and none of it for crap. A fine state. I would say that the best of us always comes out when we are against the wall; when we feel the sword dangling overhead. Personally I would not have it any other way."

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 07 - Shrinking The Tonal.

On Wednesday morning I left my hotel around nine forty-five. I walked slowly allowing myself fifteen minutes to reach the place where don Juan and I had agreed to meet. He had picked a corner on the Paseo de la Reforma five or six blocks away in front of the ticket office of an airline.

I had just finished eating breakfast with a friend of mine. He had wanted to walk with me, but I had insinuated that I was going to meet a girl. I deliberately walked on the opposite side of the street from where the airline office was. I had the nagging suspicion that my friend, who had always wanted me to introduce him to don Juan, knew that I was going to meet him and might be following me. I was afraid that if I turned around I would find him behind me.

I saw don Juan at a magazine stand on the other side of the street. I started to cross over but had to stop on the divider and wait there until it was safe to walk all the way across the wide boulevard. I turned around casually to see if my friend was following me. He was standing on the corner behind me. He smiled sheepishly and waved his hand as if telling me that he had been incapable of controlling himself. I dashed across the street without giving him time to catch up with me.

Don Juan seemed to be aware of my predicament. When I reached him he gave a furtive glance over my shoulder.

"He is coming," he said. "We had better go down the side street."

He pointed to a street which cut diagonally into the Paseo de la Reforma at the point where we were standing. I quickly oriented myself. I had never been on that street, but two days before I had been in the airline ticket office.

I knew its peculiar layout. The office was on the pointed corner made by the two streets. It had a door opening onto each street and the distance between the two doors must have been about ten to twelve feet. There was an aisle through the office from door to door, and a person could easily go from one street to the other. There were desks on one side of that pathway and a large round counter with clerks and cashiers on the other side. The day I had been there the place had been filled with people.

I wanted to hurry up, perhaps even run, but don Juan's pace was relaxed. As we reached the office door on the diagonal street, I knew without having to turn around that my friend had also run across the boulevard and was about to turn into the street where we were walking. I looked at don Juan; hoping that he had a solution. He shrugged his shoulders.

I felt annoyed and could not think of anything myself short of punching my friend in the nose. I must have sighed or exhaled at that very moment because the next thing I felt was sudden loss of air due to a formidable shove that don Juan had given me which sent me whirling through the door of the airline office.

Propelled by his tremendous push I practically flew into the room. Don Juan had caught me so unprepared that my body had not offered any resistance. My fright merged with the actual jolt of his thrust. I automatically put my arms in front of me to protect my face.

The force of don Juan's shove had been so great that saliva flew out of my mouth and I experienced a mild vertigo as I stumbled inside the room. I nearly lost my balance and had to make a supreme effort not to fall down. I twirled around a couple of times. It seemed that the speed of my movements made the scene blurry. I vaguely noticed a crowd of customers conducting their business. I felt extremely embarrassed. I knew that everyone was looking at me as I reeled across the room.

The idea that I was making a fool out of myself was more than discomforting. A series of thoughts flashed through my mind. I had the certainty that I was going to fall on my face; or I would bump into a customer, perhaps an old lady, who would be injured by the impact; or worse yet, the glass door at the other end would be closed and I would smash against it.

In a dazed state I reached the door to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was open and I stepped out. My preoccupation of the moment was that I had to keep cool, turn to my right and walk on the boulevard towards downtown as if nothing had happened. I was sure that don Juan would join me, and that perhaps my friend might have kept on walking along the diagonal street.

I opened my eyes; or rather I focused them on the area in front of me. I had a long moment of numbness before I fully realized what had happened. I was not on the Paseo de la Reforma, as I should have been, but in the Lagunilla market one and a half miles away.

What I experienced at the moment of that realization was such an intense astonishment that all I could do was stare; stupefied.

I looked around in order to orient myself. I realized that I was actually standing very close to where I had met don Juan on my first day in Mexico City. Perhaps I was even on the same spot. The stands that sold old coins were five feet away. I made a supreme effort to take hold of myself. Obviously I had to be experiencing a hallucination. It could not possibly be any other way.

I quickly turned to go back through the door into the office, but behind me there was only a row of stands with secondhand books and magazines. Don Juan was standing next to me, to my right. He had an enormous smile on his face.

There was a pressure in my head; a tickling feeling as if carbonated soda were going through my nose. I was speechless. I tried to say something without success.

I clearly heard don Juan say that I should not try to talk or think, but I wanted to say something; anything. An awful nervousness was building up inside my chest. I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

Don Juan did not shake me as he usually does when I fall prey to an uncontrollable fear. Instead he patted me gently on the head.

"Now, now, little Carlos," he said. "Do not lose your marbles."

He held my face in his hands for an instant.

"Do not try to talk," he said.

He let my face go and pointed to what was taking place all around us.

"This is not for talking," he said. "This is only for watching. Watch! Watch everything!"

I was really crying. My reaction to my crying was very strange however. I kept on weeping without any concern. It did not matter to me, at that moment, whether or not I was making a fool out of myself.

I looked around. Right in front of me there was a middle-aged man wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt and dark gray pants. He seemed to be an American. A chubby woman, apparently his wife, was holding on to his arm. The man was handling some coins, while a thirteen or fourteen year old boy, perhaps the son of the proprietor, watched him. The boy followed every movement the older man made. Finally the man put the coins back on the table and the boy immediately relaxed.

"Watch everything!" don Juan demanded again.

There was nothing unusual to watch. People were passing by going in every direction. I turned around. A man who appeared to run the magazine stand was staring at me. He blinked repeatedly as if he were about to fall asleep. He seemed tired or sick, and looked seedy.

I felt that there was nothing to watch; at least nothing of real consequence. I stared at the scene. I found that it was impossible to concentrate my attention on anything. Don Juan walked in a circle around me. He acted as if he were assessing something in me. He shook his head and puckered his lips.

"Come, come," he said, grabbing me gently by the arm. "It is time to walk."

As soon as we began to move I noticed that my body was very light. In fact I felt that the soles of my feet were spongy. They had a peculiar rubbery, springing quality.

Don Juan must have been aware of my sensations. He held me tightly as if not to let me escape. He pressed down on me as though he were afraid I would move upwards beyond his reach like a balloon.

Walking made me feel better. My nervousness gave way to a comfortable easiness.

Don Juan insisted again that I should observe everything. I told him that there was nothing I wanted to watch; that it made no difference to me what people were doing in the market; and that I did not want to feel like an idiot dutifully observing some moronic activity of someone buying coins and old books while the real thing was escaping through my fingers.

"What is the real thing?" he asked.

I stopped walking and vehemently told him that the important thing was whatever he had done to make me perceive that I had covered the distance between the ticket office and the market in seconds.

At that point I began to shiver and felt I was going to get ill. Don Juan made me put my hands against my stomach.

He pointed all around him and stated again, in a matter-of-fact tone, that the mundane activity around us was the only thing of importance.

I felt annoyed with him. I had the physical feeling of spinning. I took a deep breath.

"What did you do, don Juan?" I asked with forced casualness.

With a reassuring tone he said that he could tell me about that any time, but that whatever was happening all around me was not ever going to be repeated.

I had no quarrel with that. The activity I was witnessing obviously could not be repeated again in all its complexity. My point was that I could observe a very similar activity any time. On the other hand, the implication of having been transported over the distance, in whatever form, was of immeasurable significance.

When I voiced these opinions don Juan made his head shiver as if what he had heard me say was actually painful to him.

We walked in silence for a moment. My body was feverish. I noticed that the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were burning hot. The same unusual heat also seemed to be localized in my nostrils and eyelids.

"What did you do, don Juan?" I asked him pleadingly.

He did not answer me but patted me on the chest and laughed. He said that men were very frail creatures, who made themselves even more frail with their indulging. In a very serious tone he exhorted me not to feel that I was about to perish, but to push myself beyond my limits; and to simply engage my attention on the world around me.

We continued walking at a very slow pace. My preoccupation was paramount. I could not pay attention to anything. Don Juan stopped and seemed to deliberate whether or not to speak. He opened his mouth to say something, but then he appeared to change his mind and we began to walk again.

"What happened is that you came here," he said abruptly as he turned and stared at me.

"How did that happen?"

He said that he did not know, and that the only thing he did know was that I had selected that place myself.

Our impasse became even more hopeless as we kept on talking. I wanted to know the steps and he insisted that the selection of the place was the only thing we could discuss, and since I did not know why I had chosen it, there was essentially nothing to talk about. He criticized, without getting angry, my obsession to reason out everything as an unnecessary indulging. He said that it was simpler and more effective just to act without seeking explanations, and that by talking about my experience and by thinking about it I was dissipating it.

After a few moments he said that we had to leave that place because I had spoiled it and it would become increasingly injurious to me.

We left the market and walked to the Alameda Park. I was exhausted. I plunked down on a bench. It was only then that it occurred to me to look at my watch. It was 10:20 a.m. I had to make quite an effort in order to focus my attention. I did not remember the exact time when I had met don Juan. I calculated that it must have been around ten. And it could not have taken us more than ten minutes to walk from the market to the park, which left only ten minutes unaccounted for.

I told don Juan about my calculations. He smiled. I had the certainty that his smile hid his contempt for me, yet there was nothing in his face to betray that feeling.

"You think I am a hopeless idiot, do you not, don Juan?"

"Ah ha!" he said and jumped to his feet.

His reaction was so unexpected that I also jumped up at the same time.

"Tell me exactly what you think my feelings are," he said emphatically.

I felt I knew his feelings. It was as if I were feeling them myself. But when I tried to say what I felt, I realized I could not talk about it. To speak required a tremendous effort.

Don Juan said that I did not have enough power yet to 'see' him. But I could certainly 'see' enough to find myself suitable explanations for what was happening.

"Do not be bashful," he said. "Tell me exactly what you see."

I had a sudden and strange thought very similar to thoughts that usually come to my mind just before falling asleep. It was more than a thought. 'A complete image' would be a better description of it. I saw a tableau containing various personages.

The one which was directly in front of me was a man sitting behind a window frame. The area beyond the frame was diffuse, but the frame and the man were crystal clear. He was looking at me. Hs head was turned slightly to his left so he was actually looking askance at me. I could see his eyes moving to keep me within focus. He was leaning on the windowsill with his right elbow. His hand was clenched into a fist and his muscles were contracted.

To the left of the man there was another image in the tableau. It was a flying lion. That is, the head and the mane were those of a lion, but the lower part of its body belonged to a curly white French poodle.

I was about to focus my attention on it, when the man made a smacking sound with his lips and stuck his head and trunk out of the window. His whole body emerged as if something were pushing him. He hung for a moment, grabbing the windowsill with the tips of his fingers as he swung like a pendulum. Then he let go.

I experienced in my own body the sensation of falling. It was not a plummeting down, but a soft descent, and then a cushioned floating. The man was weightless. He remained stationary for a moment and then he went out of sight as if an uncontrollable force had sipped him away through a crack in the tableau. An instant later he was back at the window looking askance at me. His right forearm was resting on the windowsill, only this time his hand was waving good-by to me.

Don Juan's comment was that my 'seeing' was too elaborate.

"You can do better than that," he said. "You want me to explain what happened. Well I want you to use your seeing to do that. You saw, but you saw crap. That kind of information is useless to a warrior. It would take too long to figure out what is what. Seeing must be direct because a warrior can not use his time to unravel what he himself is seeing. Seeing is seeing because it cuts through all that nonsense."

I asked him if he thought that my vision had only been a hallucination and not really 'seeing'. He was convinced it had been 'seeing' because of the intricacy of detail, but that it was inappropriate for the occasion.

"Do you think that my visions explain anything?" I asked.

"Sure they do. But I would not try to unravel them if I were you. In the beginning seeing is confusing and it is easy to get lost in it. As the warrior gets tighter, however, his seeing becomes what it should be; a direct knowing."

As don Juan spoke I had one of those peculiar lapses of feelings and I clearly sensed that I was about to unveil something which I already knew, a thing which eluded me by turning into something very blurry. I became aware that I was involved in a struggle. The more I tried to define or reach that elusive piece of knowledge, the deeper it sank.

"That seeing was too... too visionary," don Juan said.

The sound of his voice shook me.

"A warrior asks a question and through his seeing he gets an answer, but the answer is simple; never embellished to the point of flying French poodles."

We laughed at the image. And half jokingly I told him that he was too strict; that anyone going through what I had gone through that morning deserved a bit of leniency.

"That is the easy way out," he said. "That is the indulging way. You hinge the world on the feeling that everything is too much for you. You are not living like a warrior."

I told him that there were so many facets of what he called a warrior's way that it was impossible to fulfill all of them; and that the meaning of it became clear only as I encountered new instances where I had to apply it.

"A rule of thumb for a warrior," he said, "is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him; much less drain his power.

"To be a warrior means to be humble and alert. Today you were supposed to watch the scene which was unfolding in front of your eyes; not to ponder how all that was possible. You focused your attention on the wrong place. If I wanted to be lenient with you, I could easily say that since this was the first time it had happened to you, you were not prepared. But that is not permissible because you came here as a warrior ready to die. Therefore what happened to you today shouldn't have caught you with your pants down."

I conceded that my tendency was to indulge in fear and bewilderment.

"Let us say that a rule of thumb for you should be that when you come to see me you should come prepared to die," he said. "If you come here ready to die, there should not be any pitfalls; or any unwelcome surprises; or any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently fall into place because you are expecting nothing."

"That is easy to say, don Juan. I am on the receiving end though. I am the one who has to live with all this."

"It is not that you have to live with all this. You are all this. You are not just tolerating it for the time being. Your decision to join forces with this evil world of sorcery should have burned all the lingering feelings of confusion, and should give you the spunk to claim all this as your world."

I felt embarrassed and sad. Don Juan's actions, no matter how prepared I was, taxed me in such a way that every time I came in contact with him I was left with no other recourse but to act and feel like a half-rational nagging person. I had a surge of wrath and did not want to write any more. At that moment I wanted to rip my notes and throw everything in the trash can; and I would have done that had it not been for don Juan who laughed and held my arm; restraining me.

In a mocking tone he said that my 'tonal' was about to fool itself again. He recommended that I should go to the fountain and splash water on my neck and ears.

The water soothed me. We were quiet for a long time.

"Write, write," don Juan coaxed me in a friendly tone. "Let us say that your notebook is the only sorcery you have. To rip it up is another way of opening yourself to your death. It will be another of your tantrums; a flashy tantrum at best; not a change. A warrior does not ever leave the island of the tonal. He uses it."

He pointed all around me with a quick movement of his hand and then touched my notebook.

"This is your world. You can not renounce it. It is useless to get angry and feel disappointed with oneself. All that that proves is that one's tonal is involved in an internal battle. A battle within one's tonal is one of the most inane contests I can think of. The tight life of a warrior is designed to end that struggle. From the beginning I have taught you to avoid wear and tear.

Now there is no longer a war within you- not as it used to be- because the warrior's way is harmony; the harmony between actions and decisions at first, and then the harmony between tonal and nagual.

"Throughout the time I have known you I have talked to both your tonal and your nagual. That is the way the instruction should be conducted.

"In the beginning, a teacher has to talk to the tonal. It is the tonal that has to relinquish control. But it should be made to do so gladly. For example, your tonal has relinquished some controls without much struggle because it became clear to it that, had it remained the way it was, the totality of you would be dead by now.

In other words, the tonal is made to give up unnecessary things like self-importance and indulging which only plunge it into boredom. The whole trouble is that the tonal clings to those things when it should be glad to rid itself of that crap.

The task then is to convince the tonal to become free and fluid. That is what a sorcerer needs before anything else; a strong, free tonal. The stronger it gets the less it clings to its doings, and the easier it is to shrink it. So what happened this morning was that I saw the opportunity to shrink your tonal. For an instant you were absent-minded; hurrying; not thinking; and I grabbed that moment to shove you.

"The tonal shrinks at given times, especially when it is embarrassed. In fact one of the features of the tonal is its shyness. Its shyness is not really an issue; but there are certain instances when the tonal is taken by surprise, and its shyness unavoidably makes it shrink.

"This morning I plucked my cubic centimeter of chance. I noticed the open door of that office and gave you a shove. A shove is then the technique for shrinking the tonal. One must shove at the precise instant. For that, of course, one must know how to see.

"Once the man has been shoved and his tonal has shrunk, his nagual, if it is already in motion- no matter how small this motion is- will take over and achieve extraordinary deeds. Your nagual took over this morning and you ended up in the market."

He remained silent for a moment. He seemed to be waiting for questions. We looked at each other.

"I really do not know how," he said as if reading my mind. "All I know is that the nagual is capable of inconceivable feats.

"This morning I asked you to watch. That scene in front of you, whatever it may have been, had an incalculable value for you. But instead of following my advice you indulged in self-pity and confusion; and did not watch.

"For a while you were all nagual and could not talk. That was the time to watch. Then, little by little, your tonal took over again; and rather than plunging you into a deadly battle between your tonal and nagual I walked you here."

"What was there in that scene, don Juan? What was so important?"

"I do not know. It was not happening to me."

"What do you mean?"

"It was your experience, not mine."

"But you were with me. Were you not?"

"No. I was not. You were alone. I repeatedly told you to watch everything because that scene was only for you."

"But you were next to me, don Juan."

"No. I was not. But it is useless to talk about it. Whatever I may say does not make sense because during those moments we were in nagual's time. The affairs of the nagual can be witnessed only with the body; not the reason."

"If you were not with me, don Juan, who or what was the person I witnessed as you?"

"It was me and yet I was not there."

"Where were you then?"

"I was with you, but not there. Let us say that I was around you but not in the particular place where your nagual had taken you."

"You mean you did not know that we were at the market?"

"No, I did not. I just tagged along in order not to lose you."

"This is truly awesome, don Juan."

"We were in nagual's time, and there is nothing awesome about it. We are capable of much more than that. That is the nature of us as luminous beings. Our flaw is to insist on remaining on our monotonous, tiring, but convenient island. The tonal is the villain and it should not be."

I described the little bit I remembered. He wanted to know if I had witnessed any features of the sky, such as daylight, clouds, the sun. Or if I had heard noises of any sort. Or if I had caught sight of unusual people or events. He wanted to know if there had been any fights; or if people were yelling, and if they were, what they had said.

I could not answer any of his questions. The plain truth was that I had accepted the event at its apparent face value; admitting as a truism that I had 'flown' over a considerable distance in one or two seconds; and that thanks to don Juan's knowledge, whatever it may have been, I had landed in all my material corporeality inside the market.

My reactions were a direct corollary of such an interpretation. I wanted to know the procedures; the member's knowledge; the 'how to do it'. Therefore I did not care to observe what I was convinced were the ordinary happenings of a mundane event.

"Do you think that people saw me in the market?" I asked.

Don Juan did not answer. He laughed and tapped me lightly with his fist.

I tried to remember if I had actually had any physical contact with people. My memory failed me.

"What did the people in the airline office see when I stumbled in?" I asked.

"They probably saw a man staggering from one door to the other."

"But did they see me disappear into thin air?"

"That is taken care of by the nagual. I do not know how. All I can tell you is that we are fluid luminous beings made out of fibers. The agreement that we are solid objects is the tonal's doing. When the tonal shrinks, extraordinary things are possible. But they are only extraordinary for the tonal.

"For the nagual, it is nothing to move the way you did this morning. Especially for your nagual which is already capable of difficult ploys. As a matter of fact, it has plunged into something terribly weird. Can you feel what it is?"

A million questions and feelings came to me all at once. It was as if a gust of wind had blown off my veneer. I shivered. My body felt it was at the edge of an abyss. I struggled with some mysterious but concrete piece of knowledge. It was as if I were on the verge of being shown something, and yet some stubborn part of me insisted on blowing a cloud over it.

The struggle made me numb by degrees, until I could not feel my body. My mouth was open and my eyes were half closed. I had the feeling I could see my face getting harder and harder until it was the face of a dried corpse with the yellowish skin stuck tight to the skull.

The next thing I felt was a jolt. Don Juan was standing by me holding an empty bucket of water. He had soaked me. I coughed and wiped the water from my face, and felt another cold seizure in my back. I jumped up from the bench. Don Juan had poured some water down my neck.

There was a group of children looking at me and laughing. Don Juan smiled at me. He held my notebook and said that we had better go to my hotel so I could change my clothes. He led me out of the park. We stood on the curb for a moment before a cab came along.

Hours later, after eating lunch and resting, don Juan and I sat on his favorite bench in the park by the church. In an oblique manner we got to the topic of my strange reaction. He seemed to be very cautious. He did not confront me directly with it.

"Things like that are known to happen," he said. "The nagual, once it learns to surface, may cause a great damage to the tonal by coming out without any control. Your case is special, though. You are given to indulging in such an exaggerated manner that you would die and not even mind it; or worse yet, not even be aware that you are dying."

I told him that my reaction began when he had asked me if I could feel what my 'nagual' had done. I thought I knew exactly what he was alluding to, but when I tried to describe what it was, I found I could not think clearly. I experienced a sensation of light-headedness- almost an indifference- as if I did not really care about anything. Then that sensation grew into a mesmerizing concentration. It was as though all of me was slowly being sucked out. What attracted and trapped my attention was the clear sensation that a portentous secret was about to be revealed to me, and I did not want anything to interfere with such a revelation.

"What was going to be revealed to you was your death," don Juan said. "That is the danger of indulging, especially for you since you are naturally so exaggerated. Your tonal is so given to indulging that it threatens the totality of you. This is a terrible way of being."

"What can I do?"

"Your tonal has to be convinced with reasons; your nagual with actions; until one props the other. As I have told you, the tonal rules, and yet it is very vulnerable. The nagual, on the other hand, never, or almost never, acts out; but when it does, it terrifies the tonal.

"This morning your tonal got frightened and began to shrink by itself, and then your nagual began to take over.

"I had to borrow a bucket from one of the photographers in the park in order to whip your nagual like a bad dog back to its place. The tonal must be protected at any cost. The crown has to be taken away from it, but it must remain as the protected overseer.

"Any threat to the tonal always results in its death. And if the tonal dies, so does the whole man. Because of its inherent weakness, the tonal is easily destroyed; and thus one of the balancing arts of the warrior is to make the nagual emerge in order to prop up the tonal. I say it is an art because sorcerers know that only by boosting the tonal can the nagual emerge. See what I mean? That boosting is called personal power."

Don Juan stood up, stretched his arms and arched his back. I started to stand up myself, but he gently pushed me down.

"You must stay on this bench until twilight," he said. "I have to leave right away. Genaro is waiting for me in the mountains. So come to his house in three days and we will meet there."

"What are we going to do at don Genaro's house?" I asked.

"Depending on whether you have enough power," he said, "Genaro may show you the nagual."

There was one more thing that I had to voice at that point. I had to know whether his suit was a shocking device for me alone or was it actually part of his life. Never had any of his acts caused so much havoc in me as his wearing a suit. It was not only the act in itself that was so awesome to me, but the fact that don Juan was elegant. His legs had a youthful agility. It was as if wearing shoes had shifted his point of balance and his steps were longer and more firm than usual.

"Do you wear a suit all the time?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied with a charming smile. "I have others, but I did not want to wear a different suit today because it would have scared you even more."

I did not know what to think. I felt that I had arrived at the end of my path. If don Juan could wear a suit and be elegant in it, anything was possible.

He seemed to enjoy my confusion and laughed.

"I am a stockholder," he said in a mysterious but unaffected tone, and walked away.

The next morning, on Thursday, I asked a friend of mine to walk with me from the door of the office where don Juan had pushed me to the Lagunilla market. We took the most direct route. It took us thirty-five minutes. Once we arrived there, I tried to orient myself. I failed. I walked into a clothing store at the very corner of the wide avenue where we were standing.

"Pardon me," I said to a young woman who was gently cleaning a hat with a duster. "Where are the stands of coins and secondhand books?"

"We do not have any," she said in a nasty tone.

"But I saw them, somewhere in this market, yesterday."

"No kidding," she said and walked behind the counter.

I ran after her and pleaded with her to tell me where they were. She looked me up and down.

"You could not have seen them yesterday," she said. "Those stands are assembled only on Sunday; right here along this wall. We do not have them the rest of the week."

"Only on Sunday?" I repeated mechanically.

"Yes. Only on Sunday. That is the way. The rest of the week they would interfere with the traffic."

She pointed to the wide avenue filled with cars.

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 08 - In Nagual's Time.

I ran up a slope in front of don Genaro's house, and saw don Juan and don Genaro sitting on a cleared area by the door. They smiled at me. There was such warmth and innocence in their smiles that my body experienced a state of immediate alarm. I automatically slowed down to a walk. I greeted them.

"How are you?" don Genaro asked me in such an affected tone that we all laughed.

"He is in very good shape," don Juan interjected before I could answer.

"I can see that," don Genaro retorted. "Look at that double chin! And look at those chunks of bacon fat on the jowls!"

Don Juan held his stomach as he laughed.

"Your face is round," don Genaro went on. "What have you been doing? Eating?"

Don Juan jokingly assured him that my life style required that I eat a great deal. In a most friendly way they teased me about my life, and then don Juan asked me to sit down between them. The sun had already set behind the huge range of mountains to the west.

"Where is your famous notebook?" don Genaro asked me, and when I got it out of my pocket he yelled, "Yippee!" and took it from my hands.

Obviously he had observed me with great care and knew my mannerisms to perfection. He held the notebook with both hands and played with it nervously, as if he did not know what to do with it.

Twice he seemed to be on the verge of throwing it away but appeared to contain himself. Then he held it against his knees and pretended to write feverishly in it the way I do.

Don Juan laughed so hard that he was about to choke.

"What did you do after I left you?" don Juan asked after they had quieted down.

"I went to the market on Thursday," I said.

"What were you doing there? Retracing your steps?" he retorted.

Don Genaro fell backwards and with his lips made the dry sound of a head hitting the ground. He looked at me askance and winked.

"I had to do it," I said. "And I found out that on weekdays there are no stands that sell coins and secondhand books."

Both of them laughed. Then don Juan said that asking questions was not going to reveal anything new.

"What really took place, don Juan?" I asked.

"Believe me, there is no way of knowing that," he said dryly. "In those matters you and I are on equal ground. My advantage over you at this moment is that I know how to get to the nagual and you do not. But once I have gotten there I have no more advantage and no more knowledge than you."

"Did I really land in the market, don Juan?" I asked.

"Of course. I have told you, the nagual is at the warrior's command. Is that not so, Genaro?"

"Right!" don Genaro exclaimed in a booming voice and stood up in one single motion. It was as though his voice had pulled him from a lying position to a perfectly vertical one.

Don Juan was practically rolling on the ground laughing. Don Genaro, with a nonchalant air, took a comical bow and said good-by.

"Genaro will see you tomorrow morning," don Juan said. "Now you must sit here in total silence."

We did not say another word. After hours of silence I fell asleep.

I looked at my watch. It was almost six in the morning. Don Juan examined the solid mass of heavy white clouds over the eastern horizon and concluded that it was going to be an overcast day. Don Genaro sniffed the air and added that it was also going to be hot and windless.

"How far are we going?" I asked.

"To those eucalyptus trees over there," don Genaro replied, pointing to what seemed to be a grove of trees about a mile away.

When we reached the trees I realized that it was not a grove. The eucalyptus had been planted in straight lines in order to mark the boundaries of fields cultivated with different crops. We walked along the edge of a corn field along a line of enormous trees- thin and straight- over a hundred feet high, and arrived at an empty field.

I figured that the crop must have just been harvested. There were only the dried stalks and leaves of some plants I did not recognize. I bent over to pick up a leaf but don Genaro stopped me. He held my arm with great force. I recoiled in pain, and then I noticed that he had only placed his fingers gently on my arm.

He was definitely aware of what he had done and of what I was experiencing. He swiftly lifted his fingers off my arm and then again placed them gently on it. He repeated it once more and laughed like a delighted child when I winced. Then he turned his profile to me. His aquiline nose made him look like a bird; a bird with strange long white teeth.

In a soft voice don Juan told me not to touch anything. I asked him if he knew what kind of crop had been cultivated there. He seemed to be about to tell me, but don Genaro interceded and said that it was a field of worms.

Don Juan looked at me fixedly, without cracking a smile. Don Genaro's meaningless answer appeared to be a joke. I waited for a cue to start laughing, but they just stared at me.

"A field of gorgeous worms," don Genaro said. "Yes, what was grown here was the most delightful worms you have ever seen."

He turned to don Juan. They looked at each other for an instant.

"Is that not so?" don Genaro asked don Juan.

"Absolutely true," don Juan said, and turning to me he added in a soft voice, "Genaro holds the baton today. Only he can tell what is what, so do exactly as he says."

The idea that don Genaro had the control filled me with terror. I turned to don Juan to tell him about it, but before I had time to voice my words don Genaro let out a long formidable scream; a yell so loud and frightening that I felt the back of my neck swell and my hair flowing out as if a wind were blowing it.

I had an instant of complete disassociation and would have remained glued to the spot had it not been for don Juan, who, with incredible speed and control, turned my body around so my eyes could witness an inconceivable feat.

Don Genaro was standing horizontally, about one hundred feet above the ground on the trunk of a eucalyptus tree which was perhaps fifty yards away. That is he was standing with his legs three feet apart perpendicular to the tree. It was as if he had hooks on his shoes, and with them was capable of defying gravity. His arms were crossed over his chest and his back was turned to me.

I stared at him. I did not want to blink for fear of losing sight of him. I made a quick judgment and concluded that if I could maintain him within my field of vision I might detect a clue, a movement, a gesture, or anything that would help me understand what was taking place.

I felt don Juan's head next to my right ear, and I heard him whisper that any attempt to explain was useless and idiotic. I heard him repeat, "Push your belly down; down."

It was a technique he had taught me years before to use in moments of great danger, fear, or stress. It consisted of pushing the diaphragm down while taking four sharp gasps of air through the mouth followed by four deep inhalations and exhalations through the nose.

He had explained that the gasps of air had to be felt as jolts in the middle part of the body, and that keeping the hands tightly clasped covering the navel gave strength to the midsection, and helped to control the gasps and the deep inhalations; which had to be held for a count of eight as one pressed the diaphragm down. The exhalations were done twice through the nose and twice through the mouth in a slow or accelerated fashion depending on one's preference.

I automatically obeyed don Juan. I did not dare, however, to take my eyes away from don Genaro. As I kept on breathing, my body relaxed and I was aware that don Juan was twisting my legs. Apparently when he had turned me around, my right foot had caught in a clump of dirt and my leg was uncomfortably bent. When he straightened me out, I realized that the shock of seeing don Genaro standing on the trunk of a tree had made me oblivious to my discomfort.

Don Juan whispered in my ear that I should not stare at don Genaro. I heard him say, "Blink. Blink."

For a moment I felt reluctant. Don Juan commanded me again. I was convinced that the whole affair was somehow linked to me as the onlooker, and, if I as the sole witness of don Genaro's deed had stopped looking at him, he would have fallen to the ground; or perhaps the whole scene would have vanished.

After an excruciatingly long period of immobility, don Genaro swiveled on his heels, forty-five degrees to his right, and began to walk up the trunk. His body shivered. I saw him take one small step after another until he had taken eight. He even circumvented a branch. Then, with his arms still crossed over his chest, he sat down on the trunk with his back to me. His legs dangled as if he were sitting on a chair, as if gravity had no effect on him.

He then sort of walked on his seat, downwards. He reached a branch that was parallel to his body and leaned on it with his left arm and his head for a few seconds. He seemed to be leaning more for dramatic effect than for support. He then kept on moving on his seat inching his way from the trunk onto the branch until he had changed his position and was sitting as one might normally sit on a branch.

Don Juan giggled. I had a horrible taste in my mouth. I wanted to turn round and face don Juan who was slightly behind me to my right, but I did not dare miss any of don Genaro's actions.

He dangled his feet for a while, then crossed them and swung them gently, and finally he slipped upwards back onto the trunk.

Don Juan took my head gently in both hands and twisted my neck to the left until my line of vision was parallel to the tree rather than perpendicular to it. Looking at don Genaro from that angle he did not appear to be defying gravity. He was simply sitting on the trunk of a tree. I noticed then that if I stared and did not blink, the background became vague and diffuse, and the clarity of don Genaro's body became more intense. His shape became dominant as if nothing else existed.

Don Genaro swiftly slid downward back onto the branch. He sat dangling his feet like on a trapeze. Looking at him from a twisted perspective made both positions, especially sitting on the tree trunk, seem feasible.

Don Juan shifted my head to the right until it was resting on my shoulder. Don Genaro's position on the branch seemed perfectly normal, but when he moved onto the trunk again I could not make the necessary perceptual adjustment and I saw him as if he were upside down with his head towards the ground.

Don Genaro moved back and forth various times, and don Juan shifted my head from side to side every time don Genaro moved. The result of their manipulations was that I completely lost track of my normal perspective, and without it don Genaro's actions were not as awesome.

Don Genaro remained on the branch for a long time. Don Juan straightened my neck and whispered that don Genaro was about to descend. I heard him whisper in an imperative tone, "Press down. Down."

I was in the middle of a fast exhalation when don Genaro's body seemed to be transfixed by some sort of tension. It glowed, became lax, swung backwards, and hung by the knees for a moment. His legs seemed to be so flaccid that they could not stay bent, and he fell to the ground.

At the moment he began his downward fall, I also had the sensation of falling through endless space. My whole body experienced a painful and at the same time extremely pleasurable anguish; an anguish of such intensity and duration that my legs could no longer support the weight of my body and I fell down on the soft dirt. I could barely move my arms to buffer my fall. I was breathing so heavily that the soft dirt got into my nostrils and made them itch. I tried to get up. My muscles seemed to have lost their strength.

Don Juan and don Genaro came and stood over me. I heard their voices as if they were quite a distance from me, and yet I felt them pulling me. They must have lifted me up, each holding one of my arms and one of my legs, and carried me over a short distance. I was perfectly aware of the uncomfortable position of my neck and head which hung limp. My eyes were open. I could see the ground and tufts of weeds passing under me.

Finally I had a cold seizure. Water entered into my mouth and nose and made me cough. My arms and legs moved frantically. I began to swim but the water was not deep enough and I found myself standing up in the shallow river where they had dumped me.

Don Juan and don Genaro laughed themselves silly. Don Juan rolled up his pants and came over closer to me. He looked me in the eye and said that I was not complete yet and pushed me gently back into the water. My body did not offer any resistance. I did not want to be dunked again, but there was no way of connecting my volition to my muscles and I crumbled backwards. The coldness was even more intense. I quickly jumped up and scurried out on the opposite bank by mistake.

Don Juan and don Genaro yelled and whistled, and threw rocks into the bushes ahead of me as though they were corralling a steer that was running astray. I crossed back over the river and sat on a rock next to them. Don Genaro handed me my clothes, and then I noticed that I was naked although I could not remember when or how I got my clothes off. I was dripping wet and did not want to put them on right away. Don Juan turned to don Genaro and in a booming tone said, "For heaven's sake, give the man a towel!" It took me a couple of seconds to realize the absurdity.

I felt very good. In fact I was so happy that I did not want to talk. I had the certainty, however, that if I showed my euphoria they would have dumped me into the water again.

Don Genaro watched me. His eyes had the glint of a wild animal's eyes. They pierced through me.

"Good for you," don Juan said to me all of a sudden. "You are contained now, but down by the eucalyptus trees you indulged like a son of a bitch."

I wanted to laugh hysterically. Don Juan's words seemed so utterly funny that I had to make a supreme effort to contain myself. And then some part of me flashed a command. An uncontrollable itching in the midsection of my body made me take off my clothes and plunge back into the water. I stayed in the river for about five minutes. The coldness restored my sense of sobriety. When I got out I was myself again.

"Good show," don Juan said, tapping me on the shoulder.

They led me back to the eucalyptus trees. As we walked don Juan explained that my 'tonal' had been dangerously vulnerable, and that the incongruity of don Genaro's acts seemed to be too much for it. He said that they had decided not to tamper with it any more and go back to don Genaro's house, but the fact that I knew I had to plunge myself into the river again had changed everything. He did not say, however, what they intended to do.

We stood in the middle of the field, on the same spot we had been before. Don Juan was to my right and don Genaro to my left. They both stood with their muscles tensed, in a state of alertness. They maintained that tenseness for about ten minutes. I shifted my eyes from one to the other. I thought that don Juan would cue me on what to do.

I was right. At one moment he relaxed his body and kicked some hard clumps of dirt. Without looking at me, he said, "I think we had better go." I automatically reasoned that don Genaro must have had the intention of giving me another demonstration of the 'nagual', but had decided not to. I felt relieved. I waited another moment for a final confirmation. Don Genaro also eased off and then both of them took one step forward. I knew then that we were through there. But at the very instant I loosened up, don Genaro again let out his incredible yell.

I began to breathe frantically. I looked around. Don Genaro had disappeared. Don Juan was standing in front of me. His body convulsed with laughter. He turned to me.

"I am sorry," he said in a whisper. "There is no other way."

I wanted to ask about don Genaro, but I felt that if I did not keep on breathing and pressing down on my diaphragm I would die. Don Juan pointed with his chin to a place behind me. Without moving my feet I began to turn my head over my left shoulder. But before I could see what he was pointing at, don Juan jumped and stopped me. The force of his leap and the speed with which he grabbed me made me lose my balance.

As I fell on my back I had the sensation that my startled reaction had been to grab on to don Juan and consequently I dragged him with me to the ground. But when I looked up, the impressions of my tactile and visual senses were in total disaccord. I saw don Juan standing over me laughing while my body felt the unmistakable weight and pressure of another body on top of me; almost pinning me down.

Don Juan extended his hand and helped me get up. My bodily sensation was that he was lifting two bodies. He smiled knowingly, and whispered that one should never turn to one's left when facing the 'nagual'. He said that the 'nagual' was deadly, and there was no need to make the risks more dangerous than they already were.

He then gently turned me around and made me face an enormous eucalyptus tree. It was perhaps the oldest tree around. Its trunk was nearly twice as thick as any of the others. He pointed with his eyes to the top. Don Genaro was perched on a branch. He was facing me. I could see his eyes like two huge mirrors reflecting light. I did not want to look but don Juan insisted that I should not move my eyes away. In a very forceful whisper he ordered me to blink, and not to succumb to fright or indulgence.

I noticed that if I blinked steadily don Genaro's eyes were not so awesome. It was only when I stared that the glare of his eyes became maddening.

He squatted on the branch for a long time. Then without moving his body at all he jumped to the ground and landed in the same squatting position a couple of yards from where I was. I witnessed the complete sequence of his jump, and I knew that I had perceived more than my eyes had allowed me to catch.

Don Genaro had not really jumped. Something had pushed him as if from behind and had made him glide on a parabolic course. The branch where he had been perched was possibly a hundred feet high, and the tree was located about a hundred and fifty feet away from me. Thus his body had to trace a parabola to land where it did.

But the force needed to cover that distance was not the product of don Genaro's muscles. His body was 'blown' away from the branch to the ground. At one point I was able to see the soles of his shoes and his rear as his body described the parabola. Then he landed gently although his weight crumbled the hard clumps of dried dirt and even raised a bit of dust.

Don Juan giggled behind me. Don Genaro stood up as if nothing had happened, and tugged the sleeve of my shirt to give me a signal that we were leaving.

No one spoke on the way to don Genaro's house. I felt lucid and composed. A couple of times don Juan stopped and examined my eyes by staring into them. He seemed satisfied. As soon as we arrived, don Genaro went behind the house. It was still early in the morning. Don Juan sat on the floor by the door and pointed to a place for me to sit. I was exhausted. I lay down and went out like a light.

I woke up when don Juan shook me. I tried to look at the time. My watch was missing. Don Juan pulled it from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was around 1:00 p.m. I looked up and our eyes met.

"No. There is no explanation," he said, turning away from me. "The nagual is only for witnessing."

I went around the house looking for don Genaro. He was not there. I came back to the front. Don Juan had made me something to eat. After I had finished eating he began to talk.

"When one is dealing with the nagual, one should never look into it directly," he said. "You were peering at it this morning, and therefore you were sapped. The only way to look at the nagual is as if it were a common affair. One must blink in order to break the fixation. Our eyes are the eyes of the tonal; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our eyes have been trained by the tonal. Therefore the tonal claims them.

"One of the sources of your bafflement and discomfort is that your tonal does not let go of your eyes. The day it does your nagual will have won a great battle. Your obsession or, better yet, everyone's obsession is to arrange the world according to the tonal's rules. So every time we are confronted with the nagual, we go out of our way to make our eyes stiff and intransigent. I must appeal to the part of your tonal which understands this dilemma and you must make an effort to free your eyes.

The point is to convince the tonal that there are other worlds that can pass in front of the same windows. The nagual showed you that this morning. So let your eyes be free. Let them be true windows. The eyes can be the windows to peer into boredom or to peek into that infinity."

Don Juan made a sweeping arc with his left arm to point all around us. There was a glint in his eyes, and his smile was at once frightening and disarming.

"How can I do that?" I asked.

"I say that it is a very simple matter. Perhaps I say it is simple because I have been doing it for so long. All you have to do is to set up your intent as a customs house. Whenever you are in the world of the tonal, you should be an impeccable tonal; no time for irrational crap. But whenever you are in the world of the nagual, you should also be impeccable; no time for rational crap. For the warrior, intent is the gate in between. It closes completely behind him when he goes either way.

"Another thing one should do when facing the nagual is to shift the line of the eyes from time to time in order to break the spell of the nagual. Changing the position of the eyes always eases the burden of the tonal. This morning I noticed that you were extremely vulnerable and I changed the position of your head.

"If you are in a pinch like that you should be able to shift by yourself. This shifting should be done only as a relief, though, not as another way of palisading yourself to safeguard the order of the tonal. My bet would be that you would strive to use this technique to hide the rationality of your tonal behind it, and thus believe that you are saving it from extinction. The flaw of your reasoning is that nobody wants or seeks the extinction of the tonal's rationality. That fear is ill founded.

"There is nothing else I can tell you except that you must follow every movement that Genaro makes without draining yourself. You are testing now whether or not your tonal is crammed with non-essentials. If there are too many unnecessary items on your island, you will not be able to sustain the encounter with the 'nagual'."

"What would happen to me?"

"You may die. No one is capable of surviving a deliberate encounter with the nagual without a long training. It takes years to prepare the tonal for such an encounter. Ordinarily if an average man comes face to face with the nagual, the shock would be so great that he would die.

"The goal of a warrior's training then is not to teach him to hex or to charm, but to prepare his tonal not to crap out. A most difficult accomplishment. A warrior must be taught to be impeccable and thoroughly empty before he could even conceive witnessing the nagual.

"In your case, for instance, you have to stop calculating. What you were doing this morning was absurd. You call it explaining. I call it a sterile and boring insistence of the tonal to have everything under its control. Whenever it does not succeed, there is a moment of bafflement and then the tonal opens itself to death. What a prick! It would rather kill itself than relinquish control. And yet there is very little we can do to change that condition."

"How did you change it yourself, don Juan?"

"The island of the tonal has to be swept clean and maintained clean. That is the only alternative that a warrior has. A clean island offers no resistance. It is as if there were nothing there."

He went around the house and sat down on a big smooth rock. From there one could look into a deep ravine. He signaled me to sit down next to him.

"Can you tell me, don Juan, what else we are going to do today?" I asked.

"We are not going to do anything. That is, you and I will only be the witnesses. Your benefactor is Genaro."

I thought I had misunderstood him in my eagerness to take notes. At the beginning stages of my apprenticeship, don Juan himself had introduced the term 'benefactor'. My impression had always been that he himself was my benefactor.

Don Juan had stopped talking and was staring at me. I made a quick assessment and my conclusion was that he must have meant that don Genaro was something like the star performer on that occasion. Don Juan giggled as if he were reading my thoughts.

"Genaro is your benefactor," he repeated.

"But you are, are you not?" I asked in a frantic tone.

"I am the one who helped you sweep the island of the tonal," he said. "Genaro has two apprentices, Pablito and Nestor. He is helping them sweep the island, but I will show them the nagual. I will be their benefactor. Genaro is only their teacher. In these matters one can either talk or act. One cannot do both with the same person. One either takes the island of the tonal or one takes the nagual. In your case my duty has been to work with your tonal."

As don Juan spoke I had an attack of terror so intense that I was about to get ill. I had the feeling that he was going to leave me with don Genaro and that was a most dreadful scheme to me.

Don Juan laughed and laughed as I voiced my fears.

"The same thing happens to Pablito," he said. "The moment he sets eyes on me he gets ill. The other day he walked into the house when Genaro was gone. I was alone there and I had left my sombrero by the door. Pablito saw it and his tonal became so frightened that he actually shit in his pants."

I could easily understand and project into Pablito's feelings. When I considered the matter carefully, I had to admit that don Juan was terrifying. I had learned, however, to feel comfortable with him. I experienced with him a familiarity born out of our long association.

"I am not going to leave you with Genaro," he said, still laughing. "I am the one who takes care of your tonal. Without it you are dead."

"Has every apprentice a teacher and a benefactor?" I asked to ease my turmoil.

"No, not every apprentice. But some do."

"Why do some of them have both a teacher and a benefactor?"

"When an ordinary man is ready, power provides him with a teacher and he becomes an apprentice. When the apprentice is ready, power provides him with a benefactor and he becomes a sorcerer."

"What makes a man ready, so that power can provide him with a teacher?"

"No one knows that. We are only men. Some of us are men who have learned to see and use the nagual, but nothing that we may have gained in the course of our lives can reveal to us the designs of power. Thus not every apprentice has a benefactor. Power decides that."

I asked him if he himself had had a teacher and a benefactor, and for the first time in thirteen years he freely talked about them. He said that both his teacher and his benefactor were from central Mexico. I had always considered that information about don Juan to be of value for my anthropological research, but somehow at the moment of his revelation it did not matter.

Don Juan glanced at me. I though it was a look of concern. He then abruptly changed the subject and asked me to recount every detail of what I had experienced in the morning.

"A sudden fright always shrinks the tonal" he said as a comment on my description of how I felt when don Genaro screamed. "The problem here is not to let the tonal shrink itself out of the picture. A grave issue for a warrior is to know exactly when to allow his tonal to shrink and when to stop it. This is a great art. A warrior must struggle like a demon to shrink his tonal; and yet at the very moment the tonal shrinks, the warrior must reverse all that struggle to immediately halt that shrinking."

"But by doing that is he not reverting back to what he already was?" I asked.

"No. After the tonal shrinks, the warrior is closing the gate from the other side. As long as his tonal is unchallenged and his eyes are tuned only for the tonal's world, the warrior is on the safe side of the fence. He is on familiar ground, and knows all the rules.

But when his tonal shrinks he is on the windy side, and that opening must be shut tight immediately; or he would be swept away. And this is not just a way of talking. Beyond the gate of the tonal's eyes the wind rages. I mean a real wind. No metaphor. A wind that can blow one's life away. In fact, that is the wind that blows all living things on this earth. Years ago I acquainted you with that wind. You took it as a joke though."

He was referring to a time when he had taken me to the mountains and explained certain properties of the wind. I had never thought it was a joke however.

"It is not important whether you took it seriously or not," he said after listening to my protests. "As a rule the tonal must defend itself at any cost every time it is threatened. So it is of no real consequence how the tonal reacts in order to accomplish its defense. The only important matter is that the tonal of a warrior must become acquainted with other alternatives.

"What a teacher aims for, in this case, is the total weight of those possibilities. It is the weight of those new possibilities which helps to shrink the tonal. By the same token, it is the same weight which helps stop the tonal from shrinking out of the picture."

He signaled me to proceed with my narrative of the events of the morning, and he interrupted me when I came to the part where don Genaro slid back and forth from the tree trunk to the branch.

"The nagual can perform extraordinary things;" he said. "things that do not seem possible; things that are unthinkable for the tonal. But the extraordinary thing is that the performer has no way of knowing how those things happen. In other words, Genaro does not know how he does those things. He only knows that he does them. The secret of a sorcerer is that he knows how to get to the nagual, but once he gets there, your guess is as good as his as to what takes place."

"But what does one feel while doing those things?"

"One feels like one is doing something."

"Would don Genaro feel like he is walking up the trunk of a tree?"

Don Juan looked at me for a moment, then he turned his head away.

"No," he said in a forceful whisper. "Not in the way you mean it."

He did not say anything else. I was practically holding my breath waiting for his explanation. Finally I had to ask, "But what does he feel?"

"I can not say, not because it is a personal matter, but because there is no way of describing it."

"Come on," I coaxed him. "There is nothing that one can not explain or elucidate with words. I believe that even if it is not possible to describe something directly one can allude to it; beat around the bush."

Don Juan laughed. His laughter was friendly and kind. And yet there was a touch of mockery and sheer mischievousness in it.

"I have to change the subject," he said. "Suffice it to say that the nagual was aimed at you this morning. Whatever Genaro did was a mixture of you and him. His nagual was tempered by your tonal."

I insisted on probing and asked him, "When you are showing the nagual to Pablito, what do you feel?"

"I can not explain that," he said in a soft voice. "And not because I do not want to, but simply because I can not. My tonal stops there."

I did not want to press him any further. We remained silent for a while, then he began to talk again

"Let us say that a warrior learns to tune his will, to direct it to a pinpoint; to focus it wherever he wants. It is as if his will, which comes from the midsection of his body, is one single luminous fiber; a fiber that he can direct at any conceivable place. That fiber is the road to the nagual; or I could also say that the warrior sinks into the nagual through that single fiber.

"Once he has sunk, the expression of the nagual is a matter of his personal temperament. If the warrior is funny, the nagual is funny. If the warrior is morbid, the nagual is morbid. If the warrior is mean, the nagual is mean.

"Genaro always cracks me up because he is one of the most delightful creatures alive. I never know what he is going to come up with. That to me is the ultimate essence of sorcery. Genaro is such a fluid warrior that the slightest focusing of his will makes his nagual act in incredible ways."

"Did you yourself observe what don Genaro was doing in the trees?" I asked.

"No. I just knew because I saw that the nagual was in the trees. The rest of the show was for you alone."

"Do you mean, don Juan, that like the time when you pushed me and I ended up in the market, you were not with me?"

"It was something like that. When one meets the nagual face to face, one always has to be alone. I was around only to protect your tonal. That is my charge."

Don Juan said that my 'tonal' was nearly blasted to pieces when don Genaro descended from the tree; not so much because of any inherent quality of danger in the 'nagual', but because my 'tonal' indulged in its bewilderment. He said that one of the aims of the warrior's training was to cut the bewilderment of the 'tonal' until the warrior was so fluid that he could admit everything without admitting anything.

When I described don Genaro's leap up to the tree and his leap down from it, don Juan said that the yell of a warrior was one of the most important issues of sorcery, and that don Genaro was capable of focusing on his yell; using it as a vehicle.

"You are right," he said. "Genaro was pulled partly by his yell and partly by the tree. That was true seeing on your part. That was a true picture of the nagual. Genaro's will was focused on the yell and his personal touch made the tree pull the nagual. The lines went both ways from Genaro to the tree and from the tree to Genaro.

"What you should have seen when Genaro jumped from the tree was that he was focusing on a spot in front of you and then the tree pushed him. But it only seemed to be a push. In essence it was more like being released by the tree. The tree released the nagual and the nagual came back to the world of the tonal on the spot he focused on.

"The second time that Genaro came down from the tree your tonal was not so bewildered. You were not indulging so hard and therefore you were not as sapped as you were the first time."

Around four in the afternoon don Juan stopped our conversation.

"We are going back to the eucalyptus trees," he said. "The nagual is waiting for us there."

"Are we not risking being seen by people?" I asked.

"No. The nagual will keep everything suspended," he said.

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 09 - The Whispering Of The Nagual.

As we approached the eucalyptuses, I saw don Genaro sitting on a tree stump. He waved his hand; smiling. We joined him.

There was a flock of crows in the trees. They were cawing as if something were frightening them. Don Genaro said that we had to remain motionless and quiet until the crows had calmed down.

Don Juan leaned his back against a tree and signaled me to do the same on a tree next to him a few feet away to his left. We were both facing don Genaro, who was three or four yards in front of us.

With a subtle movement of his eyes, don Juan gave me a cue to rearrange my feet. He was standing firmly with his feet slightly apart; touching the tree trunk only with the upper part of his shoulder blades and with the very back of his head. His arms hung at his sides.

We stood like that for perhaps an hour. I kept a close vigil on both of them, especially on don Juan. At a given moment he slid gently-down the tree trunk and sat down, still keeping the same areas of his body in contact with the tree. His knees were raised and he rested his arms on them. I imitated his movements. My legs had become extremely tired and the change of position made me feel quite comfortable.

The crows had stopped cawing by degrees until there was not a single sound in the field. The silence was more unnerving to me than the noise of the crows.

Don Juan spoke to me in a quiet tone. He said that the twilight was my best hour. He looked at the sky. It must have been after six.

It had been an overcast day and I had had no way of checking the position of the sun. I heard the distant cries of geese and perhaps turkeys. But in the field with eucalyptus trees there was no noise. There had been no whistling of birds or sounds of large insects for a long time.

The bodies of don Juan and don Genaro had been in perfect immobility, as far as I could judge, except for a few seconds when they shifted their weight in order to rest.

After don Juan and I had slid to the ground, don Genaro made a sudden motion. He lifted his feet up and squatted on the stump. He then turned forty-five degrees, and I was looking at his left profile. I stared at don Juan in search of a clue. He jutted his chin,It was a command to look at don Genaro.

A monstrous agitation began to overtake me. I was incapable of containing myself. My bowels were loose. I could absolutely feel what Pablito must have felt when he saw don Juan's sombrero. I experienced such intestinal distress that I had to get up and run to the bushes. I heard them howling with laughter.

I did not dare to return to where they were. I hesitated for a while. I figured that the spell must have been broken by my sudden outburst. I did not have to ponder for too long. I don Juan and don Genaro came over to where I was. They flanked me and we walked to another field. We stopped at the very center of it, and I recognized that we had been there in the morning.

Don Juan spoke to me. He told me that I had to be fluid and silent and should stop my internal dialogue. I listened attentively. Don Genaro must have been aware that all my concentration was focused on don Juan's admonitions, and he used that moment to do what he had done in the morning. He again let out his maddening scream.

He caught me unaware but not unprepared. I almost immediately recuperated my balance by breathing. The jolt was terrifying, yet it did not have a prolonged effect on me, and I was capable of following don Genaro's movements with my eyes.

I saw him leap to a low branch on a tree. As I followed his course for a distance of eighty to ninety feet, my eyes experienced an extravagant distortion. It was not that he leaped by means of the spring action of his muscles. He rather glided through the air catapulted in part by his formidable yell, and pulled by some vague lines emanating from the tree. It was as if the tree had sipped him through its lines.

Don Genaro stayed perched on the low branch for a moment. His left profile was turned to me. He began to perform a series of strange movements. His head wobbled, his body shivered. He hid his head various times in between his knees. The more he moved and fretted the more difficult it was for me to focus my eyes on his body. He seemed to be dissolving.

I blinked desperately and then I shifted my line of vision by twisting my head to the right and to the left as don Juan had taught me. From my left perspective I saw don Genaro's body as I had never seen it before. It was as if he had put on a disguise. He had a furry suit on. The hair was the color of a Siamese cat; light buff-brown with touches of dark chocolate brown on the legs and the back. It had a long thick tail. Don Genaro's costume made him look like a furry brown long-legged crocodile sitting on a branch. I could not see his head or his features.

I straightened my head to a normal position. The vision of don Genaro in disguise remained unchanged.

Don Genaro's arms shivered. He stood up on the branch, sort of stooped over, and leaped towards the ground. The branch was perhaps fifteen to twenty feet high. As far as I could judge, it was an ordinary leap of a man wearing a costume. I saw don Genaro's body almost touching the ground and then the thick tail of his costume vibrated, and instead of landing he took off as if powered with a silent jet engine. He went over the trees and then glided almost to the ground. He did that over and over. At times he would hold on to a branch and swing around a tree, or curl like an eel between branches. And then he would glide and circle around us, or flap his arms as he touched the very tops of the trees with his stomach.

Don Genaro's cavorting filled me with awe. My eyes followed him, and two or three times I clearly perceived that he was using some brilliant lines, as if they were pulleys, to glide from one place to another. Then he went over the tops of the trees towards the south and disappeared behind them. I tried to anticipate the place where he would appear again, but he did not show up at all.

I noticed then that I was lying on my back, and yet I had not been aware of a change in perspective. I had thought all along that I was looking at don Genaro from a standing position.

Don Juan helped me to sit up and then I saw don Genaro walking towards us with a nonchalant air. He smiled coyly and asked me if I had liked his flying. I attempted to say something but I was speechless.

Don Genaro exchanged a strange look with don Juan and adopted a squat position again. He leaned over and whispered something in my left ear. I heard him say, "Why do you not come and fly with me?" He repeated it five or six times.

Don Juan came towards me and whispered in my right ear, "Do not talk. Just follow Genaro."

Don Genaro made me squat and whispered to me again. I heard him with crystal clear precision. He repeated the statement perhaps ten times. He said, "Trust the nagual. The nagual will take you."

Then don Juan whispered in my right ear another statement. He said, "Change your feelings."

I could hear both of them talking to me at once, but I could also hear them individually. Every one of don Genaro's statements had to do with the general context of gliding through the air. The statements that he repeated dozens of times seemed to be those that became engraved in my memory. Don Juan's words, on the other hand, had to do with specific commands, which he repeated countless times.

The effect of that dual whispering was most extraordinary. It was as if the sound of their individual words were splitting me in half. Finally the abyss between my two ears was so wide that I lost all sense of unity. There was something that was undoubtedly me, but it was not solid. It was rather like a glowing fog; a dark yellow mist that had feelings.

Don Juan told me that he was going to mold me for flying. The sensation I had then was that the words were like pliers that twisted and molded my 'feelings'.

Don Genaro's words were an invitation to follow him. I felt I wanted to, but I could not. The split was so great that I was incapacitated. Then I heard the same short statements repeated endlessly by both of them; things like "Look at that magnificent flying shape." "Leap, leap." "Your legs will reach the treetops." "The eucalyptuses are like green dots." "The worms are lights."

Something in me must have ceased at a given moment; perhaps my awareness of being talked to. I sensed that don Genaro was still with me, yet from the point of view of my perception I could only distinguish an enormous mass of the most extraordinary lights. At times their glare diminished and at times the lights became intense. I was also experiencing movement. The effect was like being pulled by a vacuum that never let me stop. Whenever my motion seemed to diminish and I could actually focus my awareness on the lights, the vacuum would pull me away again.

At one moment, between being pulled back and forth, I experienced the ultimate confusion. The world around me, whatever it was, was coming and going at the same time; thus the vacuum-like effect. I could see two separate worlds; one that was going away from me, and the other that was coming closer to me. I did not realize this as one ordinarily would. That is, I did not become aware of it as something that had thus far been unrevealed. I rather had two realizations without the unifying conclusion.

After that my perceptions became dull. They either lacked precision, or they were too many and I had no way of sorting them. The next batch of discernible apperceptions were a series of sounds that happened at the end of a long tube-like formation. The tube was myself, and the sounds were don Juan and don Genaro again talking to me through each of my ears.

The more they talked the shorter the tube became until the sounds were in a range I recognized. That is to say, the sounds of don Juan and don Genaro's words reached my normal range of perception. The sounds were first recognizable as noises, then as words yelled, and finally as words whispered in my ears.

I next noticed things of the familiar world. I was apparently lying face down. I could distinguish: clumps of dirt, small rocks, dried leaves; and then I became aware of the field of eucalyptus trees.

Don Juan and don Genaro were standing by me. It was still light. I felt that I had to get into the water in order to consolidate myself. I walked to the river, took off my clothes, and stayed in the cold water long enough to restore my perceptual balance.

Don Genaro left as soon as we arrived at his house. He casually patted me on the shoulder as he was leaving. I jumped away in a reflex reaction. I thought that his touch was going to be painful. To my amazement it was simply a gentle pat on the shoulder.

Don Juan and don Genaro laughed like two kids celebrating a prank.

"Do not be so jumpy," don Genaro said. "The nagual is not after you all the time."

He smacked his lips as though disapproving my overreaction, and with an air of candor and comradeship he extended his arms. I embraced him. He patted my back in a most friendly warm gesture.

"You must be concerned with the nagual only at certain moments," he said. "The rest of the time you and I are like all the other people on this earth."

He faced don Juan and smiled at him.

"Is that not so, Juancho?" he asked, emphasizing the word Juancho; a funny nickname for Juan.

"That is so, Gerancho," don Juan answered, making up the word Gerancho.

They both had an explosion of laughter.

"I must warn you," don Juan said to me, "you have to exert the most demanding vigil to be sure when a man is a nagual and when a man is simply a man. You may die if you come into direct physical contact with the nagual"

Don Juan turned to don Genaro, and with a beaming smile asked, "Is that not so, Gerancho?"

"That is so, absolutely so, Juancho," don Genaro replied, and both of them laughed.

Their childlike mirth was very moving to me. The events of the day had been exhausting and I was very emotional. A wave of self-pity engulfed me. I was about to weep as I kept on repeating to myself that whatever they had done to me was irreversible and most likely injurious. Don Juan seemed to be reading my thoughts and shook his head in a gesture of disbelief. He chuckled. I made an effort to stop my internal dialogue, and my self-pity vanished.

"Genaro is very warm," don Juan commented when don Genaro had left. "The design of power was that you found a gentle benefactor."

I did not know what to say. The idea that don Genaro was my benefactor intrigued me no end. I wanted don Juan to tell me more about it. He did not seem inclined to talk. He looked at the sky and at the top of the dark silhouette of some trees at the side of the house. He sat down with his back against a thick forked pole planted almost in front of the door, and told me to sit next to him to his left.

I sat by him. He pulled me closer by the arm until I was touching him. He said that that time of the night was dangerous for me; especially on that occasion. In a very calm voice he gave me a set of instructions: We were not to move from the spot until he saw fit to do so; we were to keep on talking on an even keel without long interruptions; and I had to breathe and blink as if I were facing the 'nagual'.

"Is the nagual around here?" I asked.

"Of course," he said and chuckled.

I practically huddled against don Juan. He began to talk and actually solicited any kind of question from me. He even handed me my notebook and pencil as if I could write in the darkness. His contention was that I needed to be as calm and normal as possible, and there could be no better way of fortifying my 'tonal' than through taking notes. He put the whole matter on a very compelling level. He said that if taking notes was my predilection, then I should be able to do it in complete darkness. There was a tone of challenge in his voice when he said that I could turn the taking of notes into a warrior's task in which case the darkness would be no obstacle.

Somehow, he must have convinced me for I managed to scribble down parts of our conversation. The main topic was don Genaro as my benefactor. I was curious to know when don Genaro had become my benefactor and don Juan coaxed me to remember a supposedly extraordinary event that had happened the day I had met don Genaro, and which served as a proper omen. I could not recollect anything of the sort. I began to recount the experience, As far as I could remember, it was a most unobtrusive and casual meeting which took place in the spring of 1968. Don Juan stopped me.

"If you are dumb enough to not remember," he said, "we had better leave it that way. A warrior follows the dictums of power. You will remember it when it becomes necessary."

Don Juan said that having a benefactor was a most difficult matter. He used as an example the case of his own apprentice Eligio who had been with him for many years. He said that Eligio had been unable to find a benefactor. I asked him if Eligio would eventually find one. He answered that there was no way of predicting the quirks of power.

He reminded me that once, years before, we had found a group of young Indians roaming around the desert in northern Mexico. He said that he 'saw' that none of them had a benefactor, and that the general surroundings and the mood of the moment were just right for him to give them a hand by showing them the 'nagual'. He was talking about one night when four young men sat by a fire while don Juan put on what I thought to be a spectacular show in which he apparently appeared to each of us in a different guise.

"Those guys knew a great deal," he said. "You were the only greenhorn among them."

"What happened to them afterwards?" I asked.

"Some of them found a benefactor," he replied.

Don Juan said that it was the duty of a benefactor to deliver his ward to power, and that the benefactor imparted to the neophyte his personal touch as much if not more so than the teacher.

During a short pause in our talk I heard a strange rasping noise at the hack of the house. Don Juan held me down. I had almost stood up as a reaction to it. Before the noise happened, our conversation had been a matter of course for me.

But when the pause occurred and there was a moment of silence, the strange noise popped through it. At that instant I had the certainty that our conversation was an extraordinary event. I had the sensation that the sound of don Juan's words and mine were like a sheet that broke, and that the rasping sound had been deliberately prowling; waiting for a chance to break through.

Don Juan commanded me to sit tight and not to pay attention to the surroundings. The rasping noise reminded me of the sound of a gopher clawing on hard dry ground. The moment I had thought of the simile I also had a visual image of a rodent like the one don Juan had showed me on his palm. It was as if I were falling asleep and my thoughts were turning into visions or dreams.

I began the breathing exercise, and held my stomach with my clasped hands. Don Juan kept on talking, but I was not listening to him. My attention was on the soft rustle of a snake-like thing slithering over small dry leaves. I had a moment of panic and physical revulsion at the thought of a snake crawling on me. I involuntarily put my feet under don Juan's legs, and breathed and blinked frantically.

I heard the noise so close that it seemed to be only a couple of feet away. My panic mounted. Don Juan calmly said that the only way to fend off the 'nagual' was to remain unaltered. He ordered me to stretch my legs and not to focus my attention on the noise. He imperatively demanded that I write or ask questions, and make an effort not to succumb.

After a great struggle I asked him if don Genaro was making the noise. He said that it was the 'nagual' and that I should not mix them. Genaro was the name of the 'tonal'. He then said something else, but I could not understand him. Something was circling around the house and I could not concentrate on our conversation. He commanded me to make a supreme effort. At one moment I found that I was babbling idiocies about my being unworthy. I had a jolt of fear and snapped into a state of great lucidity. Don Juan told me then that it was all right to listen. But there were no sounds.

"The nagual is gone," don Juan said and stood up and went inside.

He lit don Genaro's kerosene lantern and made some food. We ate in silence. I asked him if the 'nagual' was coming back.

"No," he said with a serious expression. "It was just testing you. At this time of night just after the twilight, you should always involve yourself in something. Anything would do. It is only for a short period- an hour perhaps- but in your case a most deadly hour.

"Tonight the nagual tried to make you stumble, but you were strong enough to ward off its assault. On another occasion you succumbed to it and I had to pour water over your body. This time you did fine."

I remarked that the word 'assault' made the event sound very dangerous.

"Made it sound dangerous? That is a weird way of putting it," he said. "I am not trying to scare you. The actions of the nagual are deadly. I have already told you that, and it is not that Genaro tries to hurt you. On the contrary, his concern for you is impeccable. But if you do not have enough power to parry the nagual's onslaught, you are dead regardless of my help or Genaro's concern."

After we finished eating, don Juan sat next to me and looked over my shoulder at my notes. I commented that it would probably take me years to assort everything that had happened to me during that day. I knew that I had been flooded with perceptions I could not ever hope to understand.

"If you cannot understand, you are in great shape," he said. "It is when you think you understand that you are in a mess. That is from the point of view of a sorcerer, of course. From the point of view of an average man, if you fail to understand you are sinking. In your case I would say that an average man would think that you are disassociated or you are beginning to become disassociated."

I laughed at his choice of words. I knew that he was throwing the concept of disassociation back at me. I had mentioned it to him sometime back in connection with my fears. I assured him that this time I was not going to ask anything about what I had been through.

"I have never put a ban on talking," he said. "We can talk about the nagual to your heart's content as long as you do not try to explain it. If you remember correctly, I said that the nagual is only for witnessing. So, we can talk about what we witnessed and about how we witnessed it.

"You want to take on the explanation of how it is all possible, though, and that is an abomination. You want to explain the nagual with the tonal. That is stupid especially in your case since you can no longer hide behind your ignorance. You know very well that we make sense in talking only because we stay within certain boundaries, and those boundaries are not applicable to the nagual"

I attempted to clarify the issue. It was not only that I wanted to explain everything from a rational point of view, but my need to explain stemmed from my necessity to maintain order throughout the tremendous onslaughts of chaotic stimuli and perceptions I had had.

Don Juan's comment was that I was trying to defend a point I did not agree with.

"You know damn well that you are indulging." he said. "To maintain order means to be a perfect tonal, and to be a perfect tonal means to be aware of everything that takes place on the island of the tonal. But you are not. So your argument about maintaining order has no truth in it. You only use it to win an argument."

I did not know what to say. Don Juan sort of consoled me by saying that it took a gigantic struggle to clean the island of the 'tonal'. Then he asked me to recount all I had perceived in my second session with the 'nagual'. When I had finished he said that what I had witnessed as a furry crocodile was the epitome of don Genaro's sense of humor.

"It is a pity that you are still so heavy," he said. "You always get hooked by bewilderment and miss Genaro's real art."

"Were you aware of his appearance, don Juan?"

"No. The show was only for you."

"What did you see?"

"Today all I could see was the movement of the nagual, gliding through the trees and whirling around us. Anyone who sees can witness that."

"What about someone who does not see?"

"He would witness nothing; just the trees being blown by a wild wind perhaps. We interpret any unknown expression of the nagual as something we know. In this case the nagual might be interpreted as a breeze shaking the leaves, or even as some strange light; perhaps a lightning bug of unusual size.

If a man who does not see is pressed, he would say that he thought he saw something but can not remember what. This is only natural. The man would be talking sense. After all, his eyes would have judged nothing extraordinary. Being the eyes of the tonal they have to be limited to the tonal's world, and in that world there is nothing staggeringly new; nothing which the eyes cannot apprehend and the tonal cannot explain."

I asked him about the uncharted perceptions that resulted from their whispering in my ears.

"That was the best part of the whole event," he said. "The rest could be dispensed with, but that was the crown of the day. The rule calls for the benefactor and the teacher to make that final trimming; the most difficult of all acts. Both the teacher and the benefactor must be impeccable warriors to even attempt the feat of splitting a man. You do not know this because it still is beyond your realm, but power had been lenient with you again. Genaro is the most impeccable warrior there is."

"Why is the splitting of a man a great feat?"

"Because it is dangerous. You may have died like a little bug. Or worse yet, we may have never been able to put you back together and you would have remained on that plateau of feeling."

"Why was it necessary to do it to me, don Juan?"

"There is a certain time when the nagual has to whisper in the ear of the apprentice and split him,"

"What does that mean, don Juan?"

"In order to be an average tonal a man must have unity. His whole being must belong to the island of the tonal. Without that unity the man would go berserk. A sorcerer, however, has to break that unity, but without endangering his being. A sorcerer's goal is to last. That is, he does not take unnecessary risks. Therefore he spends years sweeping his island until a moment when he could, in a manner of speaking, sneak off it. Splitting a man in two is the gate for such an escape.

"The splitting, which is the most dangerous thing you have ever gone through, was smooth and simple. The nagual was masterful in guiding you. Believe me, only an impeccable warrior can do that. I felt very good for you."

Don Juan put his hand on my shoulder and I had a gigantic urge to weep.

"Am I arriving at a point when you will not see me any more?" I asked.

He laughed and shook his head.

"You indulge like a son of a bitch," he said. "We all do that though. We have different ways- that is all. Sometimes I indulge too. My way is to feel that I have pampered you and made you weak. I know that Genaro has the same feeling about Pablito. He pampers him like a child. But that is the way power set it up to be. Genaro gives Pablito everything he is capable of giving, and one can not wish he would do something else. One can not criticize a warrior for doing his impeccable best."

He was quiet for a moment. I was too nervous to sit in silence.

"What do you think was happening to me when I felt like I was being sucked by a vacuum?" I asked.

"You were gliding," he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Through the air?"

"No. For the nagual there is no land, or air, or water. At this point you yourself can agree with that. Twice you were in that limbo and you were only at the door of the nagual. You have told me that everything you encountered was uncharted. So the nagual glides, or flies, or does whatever it may do in nagual's time, and that has nothing to do with tonal's time. The two things do not jibe."

As don Juan spoke I felt a tremor in my body. My jaw dropped and my mouth opened involuntarily. My ears unplugged, and I could hear a barely perceptible tingle or vibration. While I was describing my sensations to don Juan I noticed that when I talked it sounded as if someone else were talking. It was a complex sensation that amounted to my hearing what I was going to say before I said it.

My left ear was a source of extraordinary sensations. I felt that it was more powerful and more accurate than my right ear. There was something in it that had not been there before. When I turned around to face don Juan, who was to my right, I became aware that I had a range of clear auditory perception around that ear. It was a physical space, a range within which I could hear everything with incredible fidelity. By turning my head around I could scan the surroundings with my ear.

"The whispering of the nagual did that to you," don Juan said when I described my sensorial experience. "It will come at times, and then vanish. Do not be afraid of it, or of any unusual sensation that you may have from now on. But above all, do not indulge and become obsessed with those sensations. I know you will succeed. The time for your splitting was right. Power fixed all that. Now everything depends on you. If you are powerful enough you will sustain the great shock of being split. But if you are incapable of holding on, you will perish. You will begin to wither away; lose weight, become pale, absent-minded, irritable, quiet."

"Perhaps if you would have told me years ago," I said, "what you and don Genaro were doing, I would have enough..."

He raised his hand and did not let me finish.

"That is a meaningless statement," he said. "You once told me that if it would not be for the fact that you are stubborn, and given to rational explanations, you would be a sorcerer by now. But to be a sorcerer in your case means that you have to overcome stubbornness and the need for rational explanations which stand in your way. What is more, those shortcomings are your road to power. You can not say that power would flow to you if your life would be different.

"Genaro and I have to act the same way you do; within certain limits. Power sets up those limits and a warrior is, let us say, a prisoner of power; a prisoner who has one free choice; the choice to act either like an impeccable warrior, or to act like an ass. In the final analysis, perhaps the warrior is not a prisoner but a slave of power because that choice is no longer a choice for him. Genaro cannot act in any other way but impeccably. To act like an ass would drain him and cause his demise.

"The reason why you are afraid of Genaro is because he has to use the avenue of fright to shrink your tonal. Your body knows that- although your reason may not- and thus your body wants to run away every time Genaro is around."

I mentioned that I was curious to know if don Genaro deliberately set out to scare me. He said that the 'nagual' did strange things; things which were not foreseeable. He gave me, as an example, what had happened between us in the morning when he prevented my turning to my left to look at don Genaro in the tree. He said that he was aware of what his 'nagual' had done although he had no way of knowing about it ahead of time. His explanation of the whole affair was that my sudden movement to the left was a step towards my death, which my 'tonal' was deliberately taking as a suicidal plunge. That movement stirred his 'nagual' and the result was that some part of him fell on top of me.

I made an involuntary gesture of perplexity.

"Your reason is telling you again that you are immortal," he said.

"What do you mean by that, don Juan?"

"An immortal being has all the time in the world for doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot cling to the meanings made under the tonal's order because he knows for a fact that the totality of himself has but a little time on this earth."

I wanted to make a serious point. My fears and doubts and bewilderment were not on a conscious level; and no matter how hard I tried to control them, every time I was confronted with don Juan and don Genaro I felt helpless.

"A warrior cannot be helpless," he said. "or bewildered or frightened; not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power. Impeccability replenishes it."

"We are back again to my old question, don Juan. What is impeccability?"

"Yes, we are back again to your old question, and consequently we are back again to my old answer. Impeccability is to do your best in whatever you are engaged in."

"But don Juan, my point is that I am always under the impression I am doing my best and obviously I am not."

"It is not as complicated as you make it appear. The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act like an immortal being that has all the time in the world, you are not impeccable. At those times you should turn, look around, and then you will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are no survivors on this earth!"

The Second Ring of Power. ©1977 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part 2: Chapter 10 - The Wings Of Perception.

Don Juan and I spent the whole day in the mountains. We left at dawn. He took me to four places of power, and at each one of them he gave me specific instructions on how to proceed towards the fulfillment of the particular task that he had outlined years before as a life situation for me. We returned in the late afternoon. After eating, don Juan left don Genaro's house. He told me that I had to wait for Pablito who was bringing some kerosene for the lantern, and that I should talk to him.

I became utterly absorbed in working on my notes and did not hear Pablito come in until he was next to me. Pablito's comment was that he had been practicing the 'gait of power', and because of that I could not possibly have heard him unless I was capable of 'seeing'.

I had always liked Pablito. I had not, however, had very many opportunities in the past to be alone with him although we were good friends. Pablito had always struck me as being a most charming person. His name, of course, was Pablo, but the diminutive, Pablito, suited him better. He was small-boned but wiry. Like don Genaro he was lean, unexpectedly muscular, and strong. He was perhaps in his late twenties, but it seemed like he was eighteen. He was dark and of medium height. His brown eyes were clear and bright, and like don Genaro he had a winning smile with a touch of devilishness in it.

I asked him about his friend Nestor; don Genaro's other apprentice. In the past I had always seen them together, and they had always given me the impression of having an excellent rapport with each other. Yet they were opposites in physical appearance and character. While Pablito was jovial and frank, Nestor was gloomy and withdrawn. Nestor was also taller, heavier, darker, and much older.

Pablito said that Nestor had finally become involved in his work with don Genaro, and that he had changed into an altogether different person since the last time I had seen him. He did not want to elaborate any further on Nestor's work or change of personality, and abruptly shifted the topic of conversation.

"I understand the nagual is biting your heels," he said.

I was surprised that he knew and I asked how he had found that out.

"Genaro tells me everything," he said.

I noticed that he did not speak of don Genaro in the same formal way I did. He simply called him Genaro in a familiar fashion. He said that don Genaro was like his brother, and that they were at ease around each other as though they were family. He openly professed that he loved don Genaro dearly. I was deeply moved by his simplicity and candor. In talking to him, I realized how close in temperament don Juan and I were. Thus our relationship was formal and strict in comparison to don Genaro and Pablito's.

I asked Pablito why he was afraid of don Juan. His eyes flickered. It was as if the mere thought of don Juan made him wince. He did not answer. He seemed to be assessing me in some mysterious way.

"You are not afraid of him?" he asked.

I told him I was afraid of don Genaro and he laughed as if that were the last thing he expected to hear. He said that the difference between don Juan and don Genaro was like the difference between day and night. Don Genaro was the day. Don Juan was the night and as such he was the most frightening being on earth. Describing his fear for don Juan led Pablito to make some comments about his own condition as an apprentice.

"I am in a most miserable state," he said. "If you could see what is in my house, you would realize that I know too much for an ordinary man; and yet if you saw me with the nagual, you would realize that I do not know enough."

He quickly changed the subject and began to laugh at my taking notes. He said that don Genaro had provided hours of fun imitating me. He added that don Genaro liked me very much in spite of the oddities of my person, and that he had expressed his delight in my being his 'protegido'.

This was the first time I had heard that term. It was congruous with another term introduced by don Juan at the beginning of our association. He had told me that I was his 'escogido', the chosen one. The word 'protegido' meant the protected one.

I asked Pablito about his meetings with the 'nagual' and he told me the story of his first encounter with it. He said that once don Juan gave him a basket which he took to be a gift of good will. He placed it on a hook over the door of his room, and since he could not conceive any use for it at that moment he forgot about it all day. He said that his idea was that the basket was a gift of power and had to be put to use with something very special.

During the early evening, which Pablito said was his deadly hour also, he walked into his room to get his jacket. He was alone in the house and was getting ready to go visit a friend. The room was dark. He grabbed the jacket and when he was about to reach the door the basket fell in front of him and rolled near his feet. Pablito said that he laughed his fright away as soon as he saw that it had only been the basket that had fallen from the hook.

He leaned over to pick it up and got the jolt of his life. The basket jumped out of his reach and began to shake and squeak as if someone were twisting and pressing down on it. Pablito said that there was enough light coming from the kitchen to clearly distinguish everything in the room. He stared at the basket for a moment although he felt he should not do that. The basket began to convulse in the midst of some heavy, rasping, and difficult breathing.

Pablito maintained in recounting his experience, that he actually saw and heard the basket breathing, and that it was alive and chased him around the room, blocking his exit. He said that the basket then began to swell. All the strips of bamboo came loose and turned into a giant ball, like a dry tumbleweed, that rolled towards him. He fell backwards on the floor and the ball began to crawl onto his feet. Pablito said that by that time he was out of his mind, screaming hysterically. The ball had him trapped and moved on his legs like pins going through him. He tried to push it away and then noticed that the ball was the face of don Juan with his mouth open ready to devour him. At that point he could not stand the terror and lost consciousness.

Pablito, in a very frank and open manner, told me a series of terrifying encounters that he and other members of his household had had with the 'nagual'. We spent hours talking. He seemed to be in very much the same quandary that I was in but he was definitely more sensitive than I in handling himself within the sorcerers' frame of reference.

At one moment he got up and said that he felt don Juan was coming, and he did not want to be found there. He took off with incredible speed. It was as if something had pulled him out of the room. He left me in the middle of saying good-by.

Don Juan and don Genaro came back shortly. They were laughing.

"Pablito was running down the road like a soul chased by the devil," don Juan said. "I wonder why?"

"I think he got frightened when he saw Carlitos working his fingers to the bone," don Genaro said, mocking my writing.

He came closer to me.

"Hey! I have got an idea," he said almost in a whisper. "Since you like to write so much, why do you not learn to write with your finger instead of a pencil. That will be a blast."

Don Juan and don Genaro sat by my side and laughed while they speculated about the possibility of writing with one's finger. Don Juan, in a serious tone, made a strange comment. He said, "There is no doubt that he could write with his finger, but would he be able to read it?"

Don Genaro doubled up with laughter and added, "I am confident that he can read anything." And then he began to tell a most disconcerting tale about a country bumpkin who became an important official during a time of political upheaval. Don Genaro said that the hero of his story was appointed minister, or governor, or perhaps even president because there was no way of telling what people would do in their folly. Because of this appointment, he came to believe that he was indeed important and learned to put on an act.

Don Genaro paused and examined me with the air of a ham actor overplaying his part. He winked at me and moved his eyebrows up and down. He said that the hero of the story was very good at public appearances and could whip up a speech with no difficulty at all, but that his position required that he read his speeches, and the man was illiterate.

So he used his wits to outsmart everybody. He had a sheet of paper with something written on it and flashed it around whenever he gave a speech. And thus his efficiency and other good qualities were undeniable to all the country bumpkins. But one day a literate stranger came along and noticed that the hero was reading his speech while holding the sheet upside down. He began to laugh and pointed out the lie to everyone.

Don Genaro again paused for a moment and looked at me, squinting his eyes, and asked, "Do you think that the hero was caught? Not a chance. He faced everyone calmly and said, 'Upside down? Why should the position of the sheet matter if you know how to read?' And the bumpkins agreed with him."

Don Juan and don Genaro both exploded into laughter. Don Genaro patted me gently on the back. It was as if I were the hero of the story. I felt embarrassed and laughed nervously. I thought that perhaps there was a hidden meaning to it, but I did not dare ask.

Don Juan moved closer to me. He leaned over and whispered in my right ear, "Do you not think it is funny?"

Don Genaro also leaned over towards me and whispered in my left ear, "What did he say?" I had an automatic reaction to both questions and made an involuntary synthesis.

My convoluted reply was, "Yes. I thought he asked it is funny."

Don Juan and don Genaro were obviously aware of the effect of their maneuvers. They laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks. Don Genaro, as usual, was more exaggerated than don Juan. He fell backwards and rolled on his back a few yards away from me. He lay on his stomach, extended his arms and legs out, and whirled around on the ground as though he were lying on a swivel. He whirled until he got close to me and his foot touched mine. He sat up abruptly and smiled sheepishly.

Don Juan was holding his sides. He was laughing very hard and it seemed that his stomach hurt.

After a while they both leaned over and kept on whispering into my ears. I tried to memorize the sequence of their utterances but after a futile effort I gave up. There were too many.

They whispered in my ears until I again had the sensation that I had been split in two. I became a mist like the day before; a yellow glow that sensed everything directly. That is, I could 'know' things. There were no thoughts involved. There were only certainties.

And when I came into contact with a soft, spongy, bouncy feeling, which was outside of me and yet was part of me, I 'knew' it was a tree. I sensed it was a tree by its odor. It did not smell like any specific tree I could remember, nonetheless something in me 'knew' that that peculiar odor was the 'essence' of tree. I did not have just the feeling that I knew, nor did I reason my knowledge out, nor shuffle clues around. I simply knew that there was something there in contact with me, all around me, a friendly, warm, compelling smell emanating from something which was neither solid nor liquid but an undefined something else, which I 'knew' was a tree. I felt that by 'knowing' it in that manner I was tapping its essence. I was not repelled by it. It rather invited me to melt with it. It engulfed me or I engulfed it. There was a bond between us which was neither exquisite nor displeasing.

The next sensation I could recollect with clarity was a wave of wonder and exultation. All of me vibrated. It was as if charges of electricity were going through me. They were not painful. They were pleasing, but in such an undetermined form that there was no way of categorizing them. I knew, nevertheless, that whatever I was in contact with was the ground. Some part of me acknowledged with concise certainty that it was the ground. But the instant I tried to discern the infinitude of direct perceptions I was having, I lost all capacity to differentiate my perceptions.

Then all of a sudden I was myself again. I was thinking. It was such an abrupt transition that I thought I had woken up. Yet there was something in the way I felt that was not quite myself. I knew that there was indeed something missing before I fully opened my eyes. I looked around. I was still in a dream, or having a vision of some sort.

My thought processes, however, were not only unimpaired but extraordinarily clear. I made a quick assessment. I had no doubt that don Juan and don Genaro had induced my dreamlike state for a specific purpose. I seemed to be on the verge of understanding what that purpose was when something extraneous to me forced me to pay attention to my surroundings.

It took me a long moment to orient myself. I was actually lying on my stomach and what I was lying on was a most spectacular floor. As I examined it, I could not avoid a feeling of awe and wonder. I could not conceive what it was made of. Irregular slabs of some unknown substance had been placed in a most intricate yet simple fashion. They had been put together but were not stuck to the ground or to each other. They were elastic and gave when I attempted to pry them apart with my fingers, but once I released the tension they went right back to their original position.

I tried to get up and was seized by the most outlandish sensory distortion. I had no control over my body. In fact my body did not seem to be my own. It was inert. I had no connection to any of its parts and when I tried to stand up I could not move my arms and I wobbled helplessly on my stomach; rolling on my side. The momentum of my wobbling almost made me do a complete turn onto my stomach again. My outstretched arms and legs prevented me from turning over and I came to rest on my back.

In that position I caught a glimpse of two strangely shaped legs and the most distorted feet I had ever seen. It was my body! I seemed to be wrapped up in a tunic. The thought that came to my mind was that I was experiencing a scene of myself as a cripple or an invalid of some sort. I tried to curve my back and look at my legs but I could only jerk my body. I was looking directly at a yellow sky, a deep, rich lemon-yellow sky. It had grooves or canals of a deeper yellow tone and an endless number of protuberances that hung like drops of water. The total effect of that incredible sky was staggering. I could not determine if the protuberances were clouds. There were also areas of shadows and areas of different tones of yellow which I discovered as I moved my head from side to side.

Then something else attracted my attention. A sun at the very zenith of the yellow sky, right over my head; a mild sun judging by the fact that I could stare into it; that cast a soothing uniform whitish light.

Before I had had time to ponder upon all these unearthly sights, I was violently shaken. My head jerked and bobbed back and forth. I felt I was being lifted. I heard a shrill voice and giggling, and I was confronted by a most astounding sight; a giant barefoot female. Her face was round and enormous. Her black hair was cut in pageboy fashion. Her arms and legs were gigantic. She picked me up and lifted me to her shoulders as if I were a doll. My body hung limp. I was looking down her strong back. She had a fine fuzz around her shoulders and down her spine. Looking down from her shoulder, I saw the magnificent floor again. I could hear it giving elastically under her enormous weight and I could see the pressure marks that her feet left on it.

She put me down on my stomach in front of a structure; some sort of building. I noticed then that there was something wrong with my depth perception. I could not figure out the size of the building by looking at it. At moments it seemed ridiculously small, but then after I seemingly adjusted my perception I truly marveled at its monumental proportions.

The giant girl sat next to me and made the floor squeak. I was touching her enormous knee. She smelled like candy or strawberries. She talked to me and I understood everything she said. Pointing to the structure, she told me that I was going to live there.

My prowess of observation seemed to increase as I got over the initial shock of finding myself there. I noticed then that the building had four exquisite dysfunctional columns. They did not support anything. They were on top of the building. Their shape was simplicity itself. They were long and graceful projections that seemed to be reaching for that awesome incredibly yellow sky. The effect of those inverted columns was sheer beauty to me. I had a seizure of aesthetic rapture.

The columns seemed to have been made in one piece. I could not even conceive how. The two columns in front were joined by a slender beam, a monumentally long rod that I thought may have served as a railing of some sort, or a veranda overlooking the front.

The giant girl made me slide on my back into the structure. The roof was black and flat, and was covered with symmetric holes that let the yellowish glare of the sky show through, creating the most intricate patterns. I was truly awed with the utter simplicity and beauty that had been achieved by those dots of yellow sky showing through those precise holes in the roof, and the patterns of shadows that they created on that magnificent and intricate floor. The structure was square, and outside of its poignant beauty it was incomprehensible to me.

My state of exultation was so intense at that moment that I wanted to weep, or stay there forever. But some force, or tension, or something undefinable began to pull me. Suddenly I found myself out of the structure, still lying on my back. The giant girl was there, but there was another being with her, a woman so big that she reached to the sky and eclipsed the sun. Compared to her the giant girl was just a little girl. The big woman was angry. She grabbed the structure by one of its columns, lifted it up, turned it upside down, and set it on the floor. It was a chair!

That realization was like a catalyst. It triggered some overwhelming perceptions. I went through a series of images that were disconnected but could be made to stand as a sequence. In successive flashes I saw or realized that the magnificent and incomprehensible floor was a straw mat. The yellow sky was the stucco ceiling of a room. The sun was a light bulb. The structure that had evoked such rapture in me was a chair that a child had turned upside down to play house.

I had one more coherent and sequential vision of another mysterious architectural structure of monumental proportions. It stood by itself. It looked almost like a shell of a pointed snail standing with its tail up. The walls were made of concave and convex plates of some strange purple material; each plate had grooves that seemed more functional than ornamental.

I examined the structure meticulously and in detail, and found that it was, like in the case of the previous one, thoroughly incomprehensible. I expected to suddenly adjust my perception to disclose the 'true' nature of the structure. But nothing of the sort happened. I then had a conglomerate of alien and inextricable 'awarenesses', or 'findings', about the building and its function which did not make sense because I had no frame of reference for them.

I regained my normal awareness all of a sudden. Don Juan and don Genaro were next to me. I was tired. I looked for my watch. It was gone. Don Juan and don Genaro giggled in unison. Don Juan said that I should not worry about time and that I should concentrate on following certain recommendations that don Genaro had made to me.

I turned to don Genaro and he made a joke. He said that the most important recommendation was that I should learn to write with my finger to save on pencils and to show off.

They teased me about my notes for a while longer and then I went to sleep.

Don Juan and don Genaro listened to the detailed account of my experience which I gave them at don Juan's request after I woke up the next day.

After I finished talking, don Juan said, "Genaro feels that you have gotten enough for the time being."

Don Genaro assented with a nod.

"What was the meaning of what I experienced last night?" I asked.

"You caught a glimpse of the most important issue of sorcery," don Juan said. "Last night you peeked into the totality of yourself. But that is of course a meaningless statement for you at this moment. Obviously arriving at the totality of oneself is not a matter of one's desire to agree, or of one's willingness to learn. Genaro thinks that your body needs time to let the whispering of the nagual sink into you."

Don Genaro nodded again.

"Plenty of time," he said, shaking his head up and down. "Twenty or thirty years perhaps."

I did not know how to react. I looked at don Juan for clues. They both had serious expressions.

"Do I really have twenty or thirty years?" I asked.

"Of course not!" don Genaro yelled and they broke into laughter.

Don Juan said that I should return whenever my inner voice told me to, and that in the meantime I should try to assemble all the suggestions that they had made while I was split.

"How do I do that?" I asked.

"By turning off your internal dialogue and letting something in you flow out and expand," don Juan said. "That something is your perception, but do not try to figure out what I mean. Just let the whispering of the nagual guide you."

Then he said that the night before I had had two sets of intrinsically different views. One was inexplicable; the other was perfectly natural; and the order in which they had happened pointed to a condition that was intrinsic to all of us.

"One view was the nagual, the other the tonal" don Genaro added.

I wanted him to explain his statement. He looked at me and patted me on the back.

Don Juan stepped in and said that the first two views were the 'nagual', and that don Genaro had selected a tree and the ground as the points for emphasis. The other two were views of the 'tonal' that he himself had selected; one of them was my perception of the world as an infant.

"It appeared to be an alien world to you, because your perception had not been trimmed yet to fit the desired mold," he said.

"Was that the way I really saw the world?" I asked.

"Certainly," he said. "That was your memory."

I asked don Juan whether the feeling of aesthetic appreciation that had enraptured me was also part of my memory.

"We go into those views as we are today," he said. "You were seeing that scene as you would see it now. Yet the exercise was one of perception. That was the scene of a time when the world became for you what it is now. A time when a chair became a chair."

He did not want to discuss the other scene.

"That was not a memory of my childhood," I said.

"That is right," he said. "It was something else."

"Was it something I will see in the future?" I asked.

"There is no future!" he exclaimed cuttingly. "The future is only a way of talking. For a sorcerer there is only the here and now."

He said that there was essentially nothing to say about it because the purpose of the exercise had been to open the wings of my perception; and that although I had not flown on those wings, I had nonetheless touched four points which would be inconceivable to reach from the point of view of my ordinary perception.

I began to gather my things to leave. Don Genaro helped me pack my notebook. He put it in the bottom of my briefcase.

"It will be warm and cozy there," he said and winked. "You can rest assured that it will not catch cold."

Then don Juan seemed to change his mind about my leaving and started to talk about my experience. I automatically tried to grab my briefcase from don Genaro's hands but he dropped it to the floor before I touched it. Don Juan was talking with his back turned to me. I scooped up the briefcase and hurriedly searched for my notebook. Don Genaro had really packed it so tightly that I had a hellish time getting to it. Finally I took it out and began to write. Don Juan and don Genaro were staring at me.

"You are in terrible shape," don Juan said, laughing. "You reach for your notebook as a drunkard reaches for the bottle."

"As a loving mother reaches for her child," don Genaro snapped.

"As a priest reaches for his crucifix," don Juan added.

"As a woman reaches for her panties," don Genaro yelled.

They went on and on presenting similes and howling with laughter as they walked me to my car.