The Tonal, the Nagual and the Luminous Bubble of Perception

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Two important aspects of conscious existence are captured by the Aztec terms tonal and the nagual.. These have a confusing history. Aguirre Beltran describes the nagual as 'an animal spirit into which the priest transforms himself'. 'The nagual only has the power of metamorphosis during the night. If it captured in the form of an animal and kept in such a situation until dawn it dies'. 'In tonalism the animal and individual exist separately and and are only united by a common destiny.' For my nagual see the apocalypse.

Harner states of the tonal 'This word referred especially to one's vital soul, and the sign of one's day of birth, which was frequently an animal. The tonalli was part of an elaborate calendrical system with implications of predestination' somewhat like one's astrological sign. By contrast the term nagual refers to a guardian animal spirit that is summoned through visualization or shamanic trance. One can thus possess both tonal and nagual animals. Harner practices a form of visualization exercise accompanied by regular slow beating of a deep drum to induce a shamanic trance state where a personal power animal is seen and caught in a journey through a tunnel to the underworld . It may also be danced, and can be sung in a power song. As it is a spirit animal, it may be of mythical form, like the daimon of the Greeks, and genius of the Romans. The power animal represents an extention of the shaman's psyche which is not bound by the physical confines and acts as a vehicle for supernormal will and energy. For María Sabina the term soerte coming from the Spanish suerte or luck means the fate and luck, destiny of one's life in a form which is also capable of leaving the human body as an animal, and causing dreams of distant places. Harner also sees big dreams, powerful, repeated or prophetic dreams as visitations from the power animal. Such shamanic activities are often accompanied by affirmations from the world, such as synchronicities in which nature appears to respond through coincidence. These may vary from seeming accidents through to shared or prophetic visions.

The relation between the tonal and the nagual is refined by Casteneda into complementary principles of order and chaos, day and night, forming together the bubble of perception. Through the haunting and rivetting allegory of an encounter with the sorcerors don Juan and don Genaro on many long nights staring into the shadows of the desert night, Casteneda illustrates a series of techniques and attitudes which function to summon personal power and set the apprentice on the impeccable path of the warrior. These include looking for affirmations in the happenings of the world, creating a mystery and uncertainty in our lives through erasing personal history, losing self-importance, and using death as a mortal adviser. Feeling and seeing are brought into the domain of the nagual by techniques which carry the attention beyond ordered form, using peripheral vision with crossed eyes including finding one's spot and the right way of walking, practising the gait of power, a way of feeling running in the night, and not doing, perceiving the complements of form such as the holes between the sounds of the night. The techniques of seeing lead to stopping the world in which the tonal is brought to a standstill.

The technique of setting up dreaming by looking at ones hands leads to interaction between the dreamer and the dreamed in which dreaming and waking events become intertwined. Casteneda also refers to the nagual as an ally, similar to an animal spirit, which may come lurching frighteningly into existence on long night seances in the desert.

By impeccably applying the will, our personal power will result in synchronicities in which the act of knowledge results in affirmations from the world around us such the cry of a bird, a gust of wind, an accident of fate, a prophetic or a shared vision. The fluid state of indeterminacy required by the nagual requires dissolving the fixed routines of life. A personal history is the defining form of our lives. The relationships we form and our work leads us into a state of fixity from which erasing personal history is pivotal in releasing us to the nagual. The power of this becomes very apparent when one cuts off ones personal history by travelling alone in a foreign land, as I found when I wandered India as a sadhu. Losing self-importance allows escape from the confines of the ego and its resulting drives and desires so that we can concentrate on will. Don Juan shows Casteneda how to lose self importance beautifully by getting him to talk to some small plants and making him recognise them as equals.

Since all actions are controlled folly, by assuming responsibility for our actions, we cease to blame the world and can turn even misfortune into an act of power. By becoming a hunter we can use our cubic centimetre of chance to seek situations and events which provide extraordinary opportunities. The attitude of the hunter includes such tasks as feeling one's spot through looking indirectly with crossed eyes. By choosing to be accessible or inaccessible we can have either minimal impact on the flow of the world around us or attract its power. Using the two in alternation is essential in hunting power. Don Juan illustrates this by calling the spirit of a water hole through blatant acts, which later manifests as a vision of a beaked animal in some wind-blown branches. By disrupting the routines of life we remain available to power at all times. Using death as an adviser is a powerful technique which keeps us tuned to our mortality and hence our impecability. Death is before us on our left side, and reminds us to live as if we were fighting our last battle on earth. Don Juan shows this to Casteneda through seeing a white falcon in Casteneda's childhood, which had escaped death through an act of power, and through forcing Carlos to kill a rabbit. In such a state we have no cause for regrets and by attaining power can adopt the mood of a warrior.

Seeing is a state in which visualization extends into clairvoyant vision as illustrated by seeing a plant which is actually hidden on the other side of a hill. Not doing involves perceiving in terms of what is left behind by form such as holes between the sounds or shadows underlying the features of the world. 'Seeing is atained only when one has stopped the world through the technique of not doing'. The ally is a power being similar to the power animal. Rather than being perceived by internal visualization, it is an apparition which may appear lurching from the wilderness when one has learned to see. By wrestling with the ally one is transported irreversibly into the super-reality of the sorceror. A perspective from which nothing can ever be the same again.

Dreaming is similarly performed with a view to witnessing the reality of the waking world from the world of the dream. Looking at one's hands forms a link to remind oneself that one is dreaming and bring on a state of lucid dreaming. Repeated looking at the dream and back to the hands can act to help prevent one becoming again lost in the dream. A very deep an unexplored aspect of dreaming is the potentiality of the dreaming and waking realities to interpenetrate. The dreamer is expected to learn to witness 'real' events of the waking world and their dreaming body to become the double capable of astounding feats. Although the warrior experiences only one reality at a time either themself or the double, later in recollection linear time unfolds to reveal the web of experiences shared by the self and the double. 'No sorceror knows where his other is....A sorceror has no notion that he is in two places at once. To be aware of that would be the equivalent of facing his double, and the sorceror that finds himself face to face with himself is a dead sorceror'. 'No one develops a double. All of us luminous beings have a double. All of us! The double is oneself and cannot be described in any other way'. 'Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this wierd crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes it is the double who dreams the self' (Castaneda 1974 48). The double is also a feature of Tibetan dream yoga and meditative techniques of India.

Casteneda relates accounts of don Genaro first dreaming his double. 'I lay down on the side of the trail in the shade of a tree and I fell asleep. I heard then the sound of some people coming down the hill and woke up. I hurriedly ran for cover and hid behind some bushes ... I looked across the road to where I had been sleeping ... I was still there asleep! I touched my body. I was myself! By that time the people that were coming down the hill were upon the me that was fast asleep while I looked helplessly from my hiding place. But they went by me as if I were not there at all. I woke up by the road where I had fallen asleep. I can almost say that I was still looking at myself waking up, then something pulled myself to the side of the road and I found myself rubbing my eyes. I ran down the hill after them. I asked them if they had seen my friend sleeping by the side of the road. They all said they hadn't' (Castaneda 1974 65).

'...when confronted with unusual life situations...the warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value. He accepts without accepting and disregards without disregarding. He never feels as if he knows, neither does he feel as if nothing had ever happened' (Casteneda).

The bubble of perception exists for each sentient being from birth, and becomes increasingly dominated by the ordered tonal as we mature into talking beings, to the point where we can perceive only the manifestations of the tonal and those of the nagual are invisible, alien spirits, or the chaotic twists of fate. The subjective manifestations of the tonal and nagual, are reason and will. As shown in the diagram, reason is directly connected to talking and indirectly to feeling, seeing and dreaming, while will is in turn directly connected to these three and indirectly to talking. The task of sorcery constitutes opening the bubble of perception to the workings of the nagual through refining the will. While reason provides our description of reality often in binary opposites, will is the source of the unknown and of power. By shutting off talking through stopping the internal dialogue, it is possible for seeing, feeling and dreaming to shrink the tonal and manifest the nagual (Castaneda 1974 253).

'The tonal is everything we know ... and that includes not only us persons but everything in our world. The moment we breathe the first gasp of air we also breathe in the power of the tonal. So, it is proper to say the the tonal of a human being is intimately tied to his birth. ... The tonal begins at birth and ends at death'. '... the tonal makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So in a manner of speaking, it creates the world' although it 'doesn't create a thing'. The tonal is an island. There is a personal tonal for every one of us and there is the collective tonal of the times which unites us (Castaneda 1974 118).

'The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all. The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description - no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge'. 'The mind, the soul, even god are all items of the tonal. The nagual on the other hand is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed but it cannot be talked about'. The nagual is there ... surrounding the island, there where power hovers' (Castaneda 1979 124).

'At the time of birth and for a while after, we are all nagual. Then the tonal starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to our functioning, so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual and overwhelms it. From that moment 'we begin making pairs. We sense our two sides, but always represent them with items of the tonal. We say that the two sides of ourselves are the soul and the body. Our mind and matter' (Castaneda 1979 126).

'For the sorceror the Conquest was the challenge of a lifetime. They were the only ones who were not destroyed by it, but adapted to it and used it to their ultimate advantage. After the tonal of the time and the personal tonal of every indian was obliterated, the sorcerors found themselves holding on to the only thing left uncontested, the nagual. In other words their tonal took refuge in their nagual. The men of knowledge of today are a product of those conditions'.

'The nagual can perform extraordinary things... that do not seem possible for the tonal. But the extraordinary thing is that the performer has no way of knowing how those things happen. The secret of the sorceror 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. "Would don Genaro feel like he's walking up the trunk of a tree?" ' as Casteneda saw him appear to do. ' "No" he said in a forceful whisper. "Not in the way you mean it". "Did you yourself observe what don Genaro was doing in the trees?" "No I just knew because I saw , the movement of the nagual gliding through the trees and whirling around us. The rest of the show was for you alone". "When one meets the nagual face to face one always has to be alone." "I was around only to protect your tonal". "What of someone who doesn't see?" "He would witness nothing, just the trees blown by a wild wind perhaps." By whispering tonal and nagual messages in each of his ears, Casteneda splits and is led to fly with Genaro. "Leap, leap. Your legs will reach the treetops". I could only distinguish an enormous mass of the most extraordinary lights. At times their glare diminished and at times the lights became more intense. I was also experiencing movement. The effect was like being pulled by a vacuum that never let me stop. I could see two separate worlds, one that was going away from me and the other that was coming closer to me' (Castaneda 1974 250).

Having led Casteneda to the culmination of his apprenticeship, don Juan finally declares the sorceror's explanation. He reveals that he has tricked Carlos into the warrior's path through obscuring the significance of some of the key lessons and flaunting other unattainable pseudo-tasks. In the new perspective, the central task is sweeping the island of the tonal clean of obstructing self-descriptions. Stopping the internal dialogue is pivotal to this quest, and is furthered by two key techniques, erasing personal history and dreaming. Erasing personal history is in turn strengthened by losing self-importance, assuming responsibility and using death as an advisor. The other pseudo-tasks such as seeing were really just descriptions of interaction with the nagual which cannot be learned, but served however to take Carlos out of his usual line of reasoning and by having to concentrate on the immediacy of don Juan's actions in the desert, he adopted the strategy of the warrior without fully realizing it (Castaneda 1974 269).

By cleaning the island of the tonal so that it is regrouped on the side of reason, the bubble of perception is polarized naturally into its tonal and nagual complement. By so freeing the tonal, it becomes capable of responding to the effects of the nagual so that the sorceror can enable the sentient bundle of awarenesses that has become linked in the incarnation of the individual to become loosened, not as completely as in death when the associations of the bundle separate again, but just sufficiently for the nagual to be witnessed by the tonal. The teacher and benefactor then work together to open the bubble, so that the totality of the self can be apprehended. 'There was no longer the sweet unity I call "me". I was a myriad of selves which were all "me", a colony of separate units that had a special allegiance to one another and would join unavoidably to form one single awareness, my human awareness. The unbending solidarity of my countless awarenesses, the allegiance that those parts had for one another was my life force... suddenly the "me" I knew and was familiar with erupted into the most spectacular view of all the imaginable combinations of beautiful scenes. Finally it was as if I were witnessing the organization of the world rolling past my eyes in an unbroken, endless chain.'

In a penultimate gesture, Carlos is persuaded to leap into a hundred foot ravine, using the fibres emanating from the bubble of perception in the navel area. 'Then some strange mood overtook me and I jumped with all my corporealness. I saw as if through a fog the walls of the narrow gorge and the jutting rocks at the bottom of the ravine. I did not have a sequential perception of my descent, I had instead the sensation that I was actually on the ground at the bottom. Don Juan and don Genaro made me perform the leap over and over. I was watching some bushes when I heard a sudden noise, a good sized rock rolling down ... don Genaro throwing it. I had an attack of panic and an instant later I had been pulled to the site on top of the rock. "The secret of the double is in the bubble of perception which in your case was at the top of the cliff and the bottom of the gorge at the same time." "The cluster of feelings can be made to assemble instantly anywhere." "Think about your hat" he said. I had a shocking moment of realization.' During the same time sequence, Carlos had also been standing on the cliffs watching Genaro playing with his hat. "The leaps certainly were an uninterrupted unit, and so was Genaro's cavorting with your hat" he said. "Those two memories cannot be made to go one after the other because they happened at the same time" (Castaneda 1974 250).

The ultimate aims of the path of a man of knowledge extend beyond sorcery as the pursuit of power into the great voyage of witnessing the totality of this ineffable mysterious world and ultimately to depart from its confines altogether. Although this may seem a fanciful goal, it is in fact the journey that all mortal beings make during their incarnation.

In assessing Carlos, one should take account of the lesson of the Coyote. Casteneda is approached in the desert by a coyote and thus discovers that his power animal is the symbol of untrustworthiness. Just as don Juan tricked Carlos into embarking on the warriors quest, so Carlos tricks the reader into the same journey through the allegory of don Juan and don Genaro, nevertheless the core lesson is an impeccable act of unparalleled power. However one should beware! Carlos is himself a flagrant indulger and the latter books descend from the sublime into the ridiculous.

The approach of the shaman, by contrast, is concerned with healing, rather than the pursuit of power or ultimate knowledge in itself. It thus has a less terrifying aspect of caring for life and the precious diversity of nature. Generally a shaman effects cure through entering the super realities of the sky and under-worlds and finding the supernatural cause of an affliction, (often sorcery). Power plants or more generally a hypnotic drumming rhythm are used to enter shamanic trance. Catching and breathing in a power animal, and sucking to remove a supernatural dart are two techniques distilled by Michael Harner from several cultures. He comments that 'shamanism represents the most widespread and ancient methodological system of mind-body healing known to humanity', [being] up to twenty thousand years old with common motifs spanning the continents. 'A true master shaman does not challenge the validity of any one else's experiences. [He] never says that what you experienced is a fantasy' (Harner 1980 20). He points out that this tolerance of many realities differs from the pursuit of the single reality of science, but stresses that the shaman is like the scientist in their empirical investigation of the mysteries of the universe and its hidden causal levels and in their freedom from political domination. Harner identifies the shamanic trance with Casteneda's non-ordinary reality and the visualizations with seeing, which can adopt a number of techniques, including using the forms seen in a rock as an oracle to guide a solution to problems.
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