The experience of being beyond thought is an interesting one. It’s the experience of being fully alive, fully present, in a way that literally cannot be described in words.

The language I find the most evocative to describe those experiences are the Toltec ideas of tonal and nagual.

The tonal is the description of the world. It is the filter through which we experience the world, a buffer to shield us from the intensity of infinite meaning that is the world as it is. The tonal is that which is familiar, secure, and known.

The nagual, on the other hand, is that which is beyond description, beyond words. It is not the description of the world, but the world itself.

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Today, after a week of living in this nice house on the lake and driving around trying to find good furniture to buy in order to make the house a bit more livable, I suddenly realized that this is the trap of comfort. These are what Tom Brown, Jr. calls “false gods of the flesh.” This is why hippies grow up to be investment bankers with BMWs. The absurdity begins with the belief that possessions and material goods are the road to happiness. It begins with buying a few more things to fill a slightly larger living space, just to make things more comfortable; and then, a few years later, finding that one needs to get an even larger house because one has too many things; so then one has to make more money; etc. It’s a vicious cycle.

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I’ve always been interested in health, one way or another. There are just so many levels of it. I was interested in spirituality in high school, and that has expanded into environmental consciousness from my time in the woods, and personal physical health since then. I’m going into acupuncture school, but health — and illness — are all around us. It’s mind-boggling.

Take the act of renting a house. We just signed a lease for the house we’ll be living in for at least the next year. Toward the end of our conversation with the landlord he mentioned that the lawn had been looking a bit scruffy, and he wanted to spruce it up with some fertilizer. He mentioned something called Milorganite. I told him that I was concerned about chemicals, and he graciously told us that we could decide what would be put on the lawn.

So I looked up Milorganite on the Internet, and found their official website. They bill it as all-natural, organic fertilizer. Hey, I thought, not bad. If it’s organic, it must be okay, right?

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A couple of days ago I made my inaugural visit to the school where I’ll spend the next three years. (Of course I visited last year while checking it out, but they’ve since moved to a different set of buildings.)

I am somewhat excited and somewhat nervous. The entire process of entering into a new career begins in a month. In a spiritual or psychological sense, what it corresponds to is the birth and growth of a public self. As I have mentioned before, I’m very introverted — the times when I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, I’ve usually scored nearly 100% introverted on the introvert-extravert scale. This is of course an unbalanced thing, and in order to function properly in the world I must learn to interface with other people and institutions, like it or not.

I suppose that in this imperfect world the task is not only to discover the beauty within, but to project that beauty outward.

The career choice, being the projection of the “purer” inner world into an “impure” outer world (think the metaphor of the Fall), is, I think, pretty commonly a compromise. To what extent do you focus on the needs and desires of the inner self over the demands of the outer society?

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Travel is disorienting. It’s not that much different from dreaming; as I drive through different cities in different states, I’ve experienced a corresponding shift in my states of consciousness, a loss of familiar points of reference. Losing those points of reference brings on a bit of panic and a sense of loss.

I suppose this is why mental discipline is a necessary prerequisite to traversing altered states of consciousness safely: You need to develop internal points of reference that are independent of anything happening even in the subtle environment of the mind, so that you’re never lost.

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The move down to Florida was exhausting and overwhelming for me, not just because of the physical work involved in moving, but because of the emotional stress of uprooting oneself and going to someplace nearly completely unknown, knowing that I have to find a place that I may live in for three or more years. I found myself questioning my decision to choose a little-known college for Chinese medicine in a state known mainly for oranges, Terri Schiavo, and hurricanes.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried. Since arriving, a few fortunate coincidences have convinced me that Divine Providence does in fact exist; among those things have been that we’ve been accepted as tenants at a beautiful house on the shores of an obscure little pond fifteen minutes from downtown.

I think it might just be beautiful here. Even with the hurricanes.

“The contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill, those who’ve got such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks,” President Bush said Thursday after the London bombings. “The war on terror goes on.”

I’ve been pondering Paul Foster Case’s statement #0 from the Pattern on the Trestleboard: “All the Power that ever was or will be is here now.” Looking at from a different angle, it says, “All that ever was or will be that is here now is Power.” That implies that the only thing that deserves to qualify as Power is what exists eternally, is what endures regardless of what happens externally.

From that, it becomes clearer to me that Power is an internal thing. Power is only what endures.

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