awake(An excerpt from http://www.uazone.org/naph/ccarlos/vera-nagual/jto_ixtlan.html). The conversation is between Carlos (first speaker), don Genaro (second speaker) and don Juan.
-Were those phantoms allies, don Genaro?
-No. They were people.
-People? But you said they were phantoms.
-I said that they were no longer real. After my encounter with the ally nothing was real any more.
"I will never reach Ixtlan," he said.
"Yet in my feelings... in my feelings sometimes I think I'm just one step from reaching it. Yet I never will. In my journey I don't even find the familiar landmarks I used to know. Nothing is any longer the same."
"Everyone Genaro finds on his way to Ixtlan is only an ephemeral being," don Juan explained. "Take you, for instance. You are a phantom. Your feelings and your eagerness are those of people. That's why he says that he encounters only phantom travelers on his journey to Ixtlan."
At any rate, in your next meeting with the ally, if there is a next time for you, you will have to wrestle with it and tame it. If you survive the shock, which I'm sure you will, since you're strong and have been living like a warrior, you will find yourself alive in an unknown land. Then, as is natural to all of us, the first thing you will want to do is to start on your way back to Los Angeles. But there is no way to go back to Los Angeles. What you left there is lost forever. By then, of course, you will be a sorcerer, but that's no help; at a time like that what's important to all of us is the fact that everything we love or hate or wish for has been left behind. Yet the feelings in a man do not die or change, and the sorcerer starts on his way back home knowing that he will never reach it, knowing that no power on earth, not even his death, will deliver him to the place, the things, the people he loved. That's what Genaro told you.
- What about the people I love? What would happen to them?
-They would all be left behind.
- But is there no way I could retrieve them? Could I rescue them and take with me?
- No. Your ally will spin you, alone, into unknown worlds.
...Spinning with your ally will change your idea of the world. That idea is everything; and when that changes, the world itself changes.
Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. Because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
