Part 9: Tales of Power

Grandfather: Well now, what new things have evolved for Carlos in Tales of Power? 

Hector: Don Juan is much more explicit about the importance of meditation. He calls it shutting off the internal dialogue. He says that, 

To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery… And stopping the internal dialogue is he only way to accomplish it. 
And it looks like Carlos has learned to do this to an extent. We also begin to get more direct statements of what a warrior is. Don Juan specifically identifies himself as a warrior and not as a master. 
Grandfather: What are some of the characteristics of a warrior? 

Hector: Well for one, a warrior doesn't bow to anyone but he doesn't let any one bow to him. He doesn't let a hierarchy of power define him. The janitor is as important as the mayor. A warrior considers himself dead so there is nothing for him to lose. In essence he acts with detachment. And of course nobody is born a warrior. Being or living like a warrior is a continual process, and ongoing struggle. 

Grandfather: Don Juan points out something even more important about the warrior, and that is how the warrior relates to the unknown, something that is outside the warrior's definition of reality. And this is a major issue since now that Carlos can meditate Don Juan begins to expose him to other realities. 

Hector: Like the etheric double of Don Genaro. Why does Carlos get so upset over all this? 

Grandfather: Because Carlos is the supreme rationalist. Remember his first book involves trying to explain his experiences with Don Juan as an anthropologist. He's trained to experience reality in a very mechanical, objective way. When his experiences with Don Juan contradict that paradigm, he freaks. The first thing he tries to do is to attribute anything he can't understand to psychedelic mushrooms. But what did Don Juan say about how a warrior handles these experiences? 

Hector: Well, Don Juan points out there are three other ways besides the warrior's method of dealing with the unknown. The bigot denies the experience ever happened. The pious man just accepts the experience and ignores the contradiction. The fool can't accept the experience and can't disregard it so he freaks out. 

Grandfather: And the warrior? 

Hector: Don Juan says, 

'A 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 has happened. 
Grandfather: It's a unique Tantric way of dealing with experience. 

Hector: How is that? 

Grandfather: You accept that contradictions exist as part of the universe. You don't require things to make sense. This saves immense amounts of energy. At the same time you keep aware that the contradiction is there so you're positioned to grasp the new knowledge and increase your power. Years ago I developed a way of relating to truth that was similar. 

Hector: What was that? 

Grandfather: It was back in 1970. I was living in a therapeutic community, a drug rehabilitation center with your grandmother and father. Your father was four or five at the time. I was the administrator for the program. I felt that I couldn't understand the essence of the treatment we were providing without living there myself. So I'm relating extremely closely to about 80 heroin addicts, doing daily encounter groups, marathons and such. Needless to say the art of lying had been developed to a high degree. 

Hector: What do you mean? 

Grandfather: If you're an addict you lie a lot and you lie convincingly. There was one point that one of the directors began using again. He slightly over dosed in the bathroom one day and some other staff walked in on him. He began coming out of his stupor with the needle still in his arm and his first words were, "You don't understand. This isn't what it seems". 

Hector: So how does this relate to Don Juan? 

Grandfather: I developed a similar ability to what he describes. But it was concerning truth. I would simultaneously believe and disbelieve anything that I was told. It saved tremendous energy. I didn't have to ferret out the truth about everything. I didn't have to live in a state of continual mistrust of the people that I had become close to. I could trust that time, and the universe, would manifest whatever I needed to govern my actions. But this is from another time. One of the most important things we have in this book is not Carlos' experience on seeing this or that entity but Don Juan's explanation of the tonal and the nagual. What does he mean by tonal? 

Hector: The tonal is the structures that organize our attention. It's the paradigm that creates our personal, day-to-day reality. Don Juan calls it the 'organizer'. 

Grandfather: Be more specific. 

Hector: Well if we look at the top of the wall we see a corner. Our perception of the corner, the material that it's made out of, the predictability that we apply to it, are all part of the tonal. In reality an infinite array of stimuli is coming towards us from that direction. Our ability to organize it into 'corner' is the activity of the tonal. It doesn't really create the corner, since the unnamed substance coming from that direction exists independently of our tonal. Yet it does create the corner for me and for you through the way it organizes our perception. 

Grandfather: Don Juan also points out that there is a social tonal as well as a personal one. You and I share the social tonal concerning the corner. That's why we perceive it in the same way. Common sense is our agreement on a common tonal. So if that's the tonal. What is the nagual? 

Hector: Everything else. That which is beyond words. 

Grandfather: Then what use is it to us? 

Hector: It's not beyond experience and through entering and experiencing, or witnessing, to use Don Juan's words, the nagual, we can gather power and accomplish things. But more importantly we are born with the experience of the nagual as well as the organizing tendency of the tonal. They both make up the human condition. Just because we can't name the nagual doesn't mean that we can escape it. 

Grandfather: And how does this relate to warriors and Tantric Buddhism? 

Hector: Well the goal of the warrior is to strengthen his tonal. Everything on the 'island of the tonal' becomes a challenge. As a Tantric Buddhist we want to increase our energy, to eliminate the situations that drain energy from us. The two activities are much the same. 

Grandfather: Give me an example. 

Hector: Keeping your checkbook balanced and your bills paid is a good example. A warrior would do this impeccably. That part of his personal tonal would be strong. You could also take care of the checkbook so that the energy drain caused by its disorder would be eliminated. This energy drain might show up in your meditation. You might be thinking about your unpaid bills instead of meditating. Or it might take a lot of extra energy to stop the thoughts of the unpaid bills. It would take less energy to properly handle the checkbook. I think the point is that we should work really hard to refine and strengthen the island of the tonal, our day to day life, so that we can have a firm base to land on when we go exploring in the nagual. 

Grandfather: That is definitely so. It's the nagual, or the second attention that allows us to perform perfectly in the moment. Let's consider what Dr. Lenz says about this.