By now there is no way for you to recollect the immense effort that you needed to establish self-pity as a feature of your island. Self-pity bore witness to everything you did. It was just at your fingertips, ready to advise you. Death is considered by a warrior to be a more amenable adviser, which can also be brought to bear witness on everything one does, just like self-pity, or wrath. Obviously, after an untold struggle you have learned to feel sorry for yourself. But you can also learn, in the same way, to feel your impending end, and thus you can learn to have the idea of your death at your fingertips. As an adviser, self-pity is nothing in comparison to death.

There is seemingly a contradiction in the idea of change; on the one hand, the sorcerers’ world calls for a drastic transformation, and on the other, the sorcerers’ explanation says that the island of the tonal is complete and not a single element of it can be removed. Change, then, does not mean obliterating anything but rather altering the use assigned to those elements.

Take self-pity for instance. There is no way to get rid of it for good; it has a definite place and character in your island, a definite façade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, self-pity becomes active. It has history. If you then change the façade of self-pity, you would have shifted its place of prominence.

One changes the façade by altering the use of the elements of the island. Take self-pity again. It is useful to you because you either feel important and deserving of better conditions, better treatment, or because you are unwilling to assume responsibility for the acts that brought you to the state that elicited self-pity, or because you are incapable of bringing the idea of your impending death to witness your acts and advise you.

Erasing personal history and its three companion techniques are the sorcerers’ means for changing the façade of the elements of the island. For instance, by erasing your personal history, you deny use to self-pity; in order for self-pity to work you have to feel important, irresponsible, and immortal. When those feelings are altered in some way, it is no longer possible for you to feel sorry for yourself.

Your self-pity will still be a feature of your island; it will be there in the back in the same way that the idea of your impending death, or your humbleness, or your responsibility for your acts has been there, without ever being used. Once all those techniques have been presented, the apprentice arrives at a crossroad. Depending on his sensibility, the apprentice does one of two things. He either takes the recommendations and suggestions made by his teacher at their face value, acting without expecting rewards; or he takes everything as a joke or an aberration.

If you use those four techniques to clear and reorder your island of the tonal they lead you to the nagual. Power provides according to your impeccability. If you seriously use those four techniques, you will store enough personal power, you will be impeccable, and power will open all the necessary avenues. That is the rule.

As I’ve told you, the tonal and the nagual are two different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you act. At first all of us secretly do not want the world of the nagual. We are afraid and have second thoughts. Our unbending intent and our impeccability gets us through that.

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