If there are too many unnecessary items on your island you won't be able to sustain the encounter with the nagual. 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 the 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.

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

Nothing that we may have gained in the course of our lives can reveal to us the designs of power. 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.

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's 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.

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.

The nagual can perform extraordinary things, 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. The secret of the 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.

Let's say that the 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.

One of the aims of the warrior's training is to cut the bewilderment of the tonal, until the warrior is so fluid that he can admit everything without admitting anything.