Some Helpful Castanada Terms

Warrior: one who can "proceed strategically" and can "stop the world". Stopping the world is one of the first accomplishments when learning how to see past our cultural conditioning.
See Sorcerer and Stopping the World.

Sorcerer: one who has developed enough integrity to conserve and transmute one's personal power. There are varying practices to do this.

Stopping the World: from the introduction of Journey to Ixtlan : " certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped..." p.xvii


Tonal: originally a term applied to the part of the soul which that resides in the head. In the Mayan embodied cosmological system, the head contains a heavenly water named "Khuicatl" that relates to our destiny and temperament. The energetic source of the tonal, or tonalli, is the sun. Like the sun, our tonal with its water also provides for our growth, vigour and development. This heavenly water can be seen as having correspondences with the dew that comes from heaven in both the western and eastern alchemical traditions.

Casteneda made the term refer to the what imposes order on chaos. Casteneda also believed there is a personal tonal as well as a collective one. We further interpret this term by designating it as the the organizational function of the soul. It derives its concepts from our conditioning, which can be both passive and active. Unlike Casteneda, we believe a well organized tonal is instrumental in being able to approach the nagual correctly.

Nagual: as originally conceived, the nagual is the spirit as well as our spirit/animal companion. It actively operates in the spirit world during dreams. Soul loss, now commonly described as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a loss of our nagual.

Both Casteneda and we agree, that the nagual is that aspect of reality which is beyond linguistic, cultural and personality barriers. It is a place of magic.

Impeccability: a description of the lifestyle of the person on the the path to knowledge. Their actions, speech and thoughts are correct.

Inorganic Beings:  as described by us : powerful, energy- draining cultural and social forces. Most people give their lives and energy away to these things. The inorganic beings are very real, yet are still only artificial constructs.