The following sorcerers’ explanation deals with yet another one of their artifices. You will eventually see this on your own, but let’s go on. Sorcerers say that we are inside a bubble. It is a bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth. At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us in. That bubble is our perception. We live inside that bubble all of our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection.
If what we witness on the walls is our own reflection, the thing that’s being reflected must be the real thing then?! The thing reflected is our view of the world. That view is first a description, which is given to us from the moment of our birth until all our attention is caught by it and the description becomes a view. The warrior’s task is to rearrange this view, to prepare the luminous being for the time when a benefactor opens the bubble from the outside.
The bubble is opened in order to allow the luminous being a view of his totality. Naturally this business of calling it a bubble is only a way of speaking, but in this case it is an accurate way. The delicate maneuver of leading a luminous being into the totality of his self requires that the warrior work from inside the bubble and the benefactor from the outside. The warrior is placed with the task of reordering the view of the world. I have called that view the island of the tonal.
I’ve said that everything that we are is on that island. The sorcerers’ explanation says that the island of the tonal is made by our perception, which has been trained to focus on certain elements; each of those elements and all of them together form our view of the world. The warrior’s job, insofar as an apprentice’s perception is concerned, consists of reordering all the elements of the island on one half of the bubble.
By now you must have realized that cleaning and reordering the island of the tonal means regrouping all its elements on the side of reason. That’s the side of the tonal. The teacher, for example, always addresses himself to that side and by presenting his apprentice one side with the warrior’s way on, he forces him into reasonableness, sobriety, strength of character and body, while on the other side presenting him with unimaginable yet real situations with which the apprentice cannot deal with, forces him to comprehend that his reason, even though it is a wonderful thing, can only cover a small area. Once the warrior faces his incapacity to rationalize everything, he is given the task of strengthening and defending his beaten reason, and for this invokes everything that he has around it. The teacher manages this while hammering the apprentice unmercifully until his view becomes half of the bubble.
The other half of the bubble, the one that has been cleared, can then be claimed by something sorcerers call will. We can better explain this by saying that the task of the
Teacher is to wipe clean one half of the bubble and to reorder everything on the other half. The benefactor then opens the bubble on the side that has been cleaned. Once the seal is broken, the warrior is never the same. He has then the command of his totality. Half of the bubble is the ultimate center of reason, the tonal. The other half is the ultimate center of will, the nagual. That is the order that should prevail; any other arrangement is nonsensical and petty, because it goes against our nature; it robs us of our magical heritage and reduces us to nothing.
Seers describe the human form as the compelling force of alignment of the emanations lit by the glow of awareness on the precise spot on which normally man’s assemblage point is fixated. It is the force that makes us into persons. Thus, to be a person is to be compelled to affiliate with that force of alignment and consequently to be affiliated with the precise spot where it originates. By reason of their activities, at a given moment the assemblage point of warriors drift toward the left. It is a permanent move, which results in an uncommon sense of aloofness, or control, or even abandon. That drift of the assemblage point entails a new alignment of emanations. It is the beginning of a series of greater shifts. Seers very aptly called this initial shift losing the human form, because it marks an inexorable movement of the assemblage point away from its original setting, resulting in the irreversible loss of our affiliation to the force that makes us persons.
There’s no way to get to the sorcerers’ explanation unless one has willingly used the nagual, or rather, unless one has willingly used the tonal to make sense out of one’s actions in the nagual. Another way of making all this clear is to say that the view of the tonal must prevail if one is going to use the nagual the way sorcerers do.
Order in our perception is the exclusive realm of the tonal; only there can our actions have a sequence; only there are they like stairways where one can count the steps. There is nothing of that sort in the nagual. Therefore, the view of the tonal is a tool, and as such it is not only the best tool but the only one we’ve got. This is the sorcerers’ explanation. The wings of your perception were made to touch your totality. And your perception spreads its wings when something in you perceives your true nature. You are a cluster. This is the Sorcerers’ explanation.
The nagual is the unspeakable. All the possible feelings and beings and selves float in it like barges, peaceful, unaltered, forever. Then the glue of life binds some of them together. When the glue of life binds those feelings together a being is created, a being that loses the sense of its true nature and becomes blinded by the glare and clamor of the area where beings hover, the tonal. The tonal is where all the unified organization exists. A being pops into the tonal once the force of life has bound all the needed feelings together. I said to you that the tonal begins at birth and ends at death; I said that because I know that as soon as the force of life leaves the body all those single awarenesses disintegrate and go back again to where they came from, the nagual. There is no way to refer to the unknown, one can only witness it. The sorcerers’ explanation says that each of us has a center from which the nagual can be witnessed, which is the will.
And so, a warrior can venture into the nagual and let his cluster arrange and rearrange itself in any way possible. I have already told you that the nagual is a personal subject. I meant that it is up to the individual warrior to direct the arrangements and rearrangements of that cluster. The human form or human feeling is the original, perhaps for us it is the sweetest form of them all. Therefore, there exists an uncountable number of alternative ways that a cluster can adopt.
I have said before that a sorcerer can adopt any form he wishes. That is true. A sorcerer that is in command of his own totality can direct the parts of his cluster to unite in any conceivable way. Once he has exhausted his vital force, he can no longer reunite this cluster.
I have called that cluster the bubble of perception. I have also said that it is sealed, closed tightly, and that it never opens until the moment of our death. Yet it could be made to open. Sorcerers have obviously learned that secret, and although not all of them arrive at the totality of themselves, they know about the possibility of it. They know that the bubble opens only when one plunges into the nagual.
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