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.

In Hermetic terms, the personal experience of the tonal is contained in the three lower regions of the mental body — Air, Water, and Earth. Earth is physical sensation; Water is emotional experience; and Air is thought. The experience of the nagual begins with the Fire region of the mental body, the direct perception of essential meaning, which is the springboard for the higher levels of awareness that exist beyond the normal state of consciousness.

This Fire region, or the nagual, is also the seed around which the tonal — thought, feeling, and physical sensation — form. The inexpressible nature of essential meaning must be condensed in order to be received and integrated by the ordinary organism. In order to give personal significance to the vastness of essential meaning, to the vastness of the world, it has to be interpreted — the infinite amount of information that is perceived by everyone on a deeper level has to be filtered and organized into a digestible, usable form.

That’s what beliefs and habits are. They are ways of organizing and orienting ourselves and of shielding ourselves in relation to the vast, unknowable universe.

This also relates to the primitivist dichotomy of “civilized” and “primitive.” That which is “civilized” refers to what is known and secure, yet cut off — or, some would say, protected — from the intensity of real existence. That which is “primitive” or “wild” refers to that which is directly connected to the greater continuum of life.

I describe all of this because it relates directly to my current dilemma. In the past week I have, quite surprisingly, found myself feeling more “civilized” than I’ve felt in the past few years. I was surprised by this because in the past few years we’ve lived in suburban apartments with very limited access to natural areas, whereas now we’ve just moved in to a cabin on the shores of a pond.

Why, then, do I feel less connected?

It began to make sense to me when I started thinking of the tonal and the nagual.

A living space, whether house or apartment, is a body; it’s the exterior representation of the social, tonal self. It’s one of the most immediately personal expressions of the ordinary self into the world. Changing living spaces in some ways also means changing one’s sense of self.

And recently we’ve changed from living in an apartment to living in a house. They are distinctly different experiences, different senses of self. There is certainly more autonomy and more comfort in living in a house; but there’s also more responsibility. Some of that responsibility is to fulfill the mandates of the landlord or the law, mandates that do not mesh with our core values. This evokes a sense of contradiction within the self, a lack of integration.

For instance, we’re bound by the terms of our lease to maintain the lawn. Now, mowing the lawn is not a tremendous issue in and of itself, but it’s one of many activities that don’t fit with my idea of valuing life for itself. Mowing the lawn reflects a view of grass as a cosmetic addition to the house more than anything else. And going too far down that road means well-manicured lawns and bushes trimmed into fanciful shapes — a full devaluation of the life of the grass, a reduction of that life into merely what suits human tastes. It’s the imprisonment of life into narrow, superficial tonal concepts.

These things were not issues for us before, because we were only passive participants. As apartment-renters, the amount of money that went toward paying the lawn maintenance people was invisible to us, hidden in our rent. A lawn service came and mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes. The landlords paid them. It was not our responsibility or concern. We could turn our attention inward, to the things that mattered to us, and believe ourselves whole, integrated beings living in a situation from which we were comfortably detached. There was no contradiction because we had no power.

Now we do — or rather, we have enough power to be aware, but not enough to fight. We have just enough power to be complicit. The more comfort and freedom we seem to have, the more responsibility we have in maintaining that freedom; and, as such, the more complicit we have to become in the root assumptions that underlie our everyday existence. We have to more actively participate in enacting the values of society, whether or not they match our beliefs or a sense of greater balance.

To be melodramatic, it’s like the difference between watching someone get killed, and having someone hold a gun to your head, forcing you to kill someone else.

In short, by living in a house rather than an apartment, we are now obligated to more actively pour energy into acquiescing our power — into conforming — to the collective tonal that comprises our society. We are obligated to become the sort of people that live in houses. We are obligated to take on that sense of self, and either live with that tension, that contradiction, that cognitive dissonance — or gradually find our values moving closer to conformity with that tonal.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living in a house, per se. But in essence, what it means to live in a house, and what it means to live in this society, implies upholding values that conflict with a sense of greater harmony and balance with the world. To mow the lawn, to drive a car, to live in a way that requires a certain degree of material activity and a certain amount of material possessions — these are things that I do, and yet I find that doing them tends to erode my awareness of the nagual, the “wild,” the greater continuum in which I exist.

This is part of why I find spiritual discipline and the practice of awareness so crucial. Because while it is usual and necessary to live within the tonal, it is absolutely essential for a fulfilling life to connect with the nagual. And that is what it is increasingly difficult to do, mired as we are in a whirlwind of activity that only serves to uphold the tonal.

In some ways perhaps this is the dilemma of all people of all times — how to find the balance between living between the known and the unknown, the mundane and the magical. In other ways, though, this is a unique situation, for we are a world perched on the brink of major crisis. We desperately need that reconnection with the “primitive,” the nagual, to reestablish the balance of our lives. Without the nagual, we have lost our deeper selves, that which makes our lives magical, that which makes us alive. Without the nagual, we are the living dead.

With it, we are magical beings living in a wild and mysterious universe.

For me, I think that part of the reason this has suddenly become an issue now is the increased contact with nature. Since moving in, I find myself now living closer to the natural world than I have since living in the Northwoods at Teaching Drum. My time there was unpleasant in some ways, and as a result, I shrank from contact with the wild for a while. This lakefront house represents a new beginning — the reawakening of my senses to the greater continuum of life.

And yet opening myself to the nagual also means gaining a sense of greater perspective on the tonal in which I exist; and in so doing, I become more keenly aware of the rift between my ideals and values and the hard reality of my everyday existence. Where it was easy before to close my eyes to it, I now have the opportunity to see alligators and falcons right outside my back door, which also means that I’m more able to see myself in the greater context of the unknowable universe, and to realize how far I fall short of living up to my potential as a fully alive human being.

To overcome this requires an ironclad commitment to inner equilibrium, and to exteriorizing that equilibrium. It means constant rebalancing, a piercing perception into what’s authentic, what’s real. It means not judging, not attaching, starting from where I am, knowing who I am, experiencing the world as it is, doing what I can without compromising my true self. It means slowly developing the personal power simply to be in the world, and enabling others to do the same.

It’s a slow process of growth and learning. It’s the karma we all have to live with.