In his book Carlos Castaneda always refers to this fundamental dualism. According to don Juan, the man is both Tonal and Nagual.
The Tonal is the social person, everything we know, our cultural background, everything that can be defined: things objects, structures, organizations, methods, systems...
The Tonal refers to what don Juan used to call the first attention: the doing. It creates our world with reason.
The Tonal has exaggerated his role as a guardian and has become a jailer. Often compared to an island, it shows that we are prisoners of a bubble of perception, that we only see things because they are introduced to us by our education and conditionings.
The Tonal is a potential of assemblage and understanding which helps us to fix our assemblage point on reason.
Every move of the assemblage point leads us to another level of perception. https://www.essencediaries.com/post/the-assemblage-point-don-juan
The Nagual is the original energy, the secret, the mystery, the non structure, what don Juan calls the power. It refers to the second attention, the not doing, the gait of power, the perception...to everything can help the warrior to stop the world and to stop the inner dialogue. The Nagual is also the unknown, a huge ocean of potentialities, creativity. The Tonal is our body, the Nagual is our dreaming body (double).
Tonal and Nagual form the totality of ourselves.
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