It was in the late 1960’s when I was living as a hippy spiritual seeker in California, I and a friend decided we should relocate to Colorado.  One night, having driven far into a stretch of the Mojave Desert of California toward Arizona on the road that goes past Amboy Crater, it was very late, about three in the morning.  It was a long, lonely road with hardly ever another car.

About a hundred miles from the Arizona border, I saw two people walking along the road.  My friend was asleep, so he did not have to go through what I was about to go through.  One figure was rather tall and the other very short.  My initial thought was that they were a father and child whose car had broken down and might need help.  I slowed down so as to possibly render assistance.  As I came up to where they were walking on the right side of the road in the same direction I was driving, I slowed to a crawl and turned to look at them.  But suddenly I was hit by an intense wave of inhuman psychic energy.  They were not human and I was afraid to look at them.

Driving past these two inhuman beings, I looked into the rear view mirror, which I felt was safer than looking directly at them.  There was no one there!  This was even more frightening because I could still feel their overwhelmingly weird and powerful psychic vibration.

About a minute or two later, I was suddenly aware that these two weird beings were sitting in the backseat.  My hair was standing on end as I tried to think of what to do.  What happened next was totally outlandish and inexplicable.

The psychic energy from the two beings behind me began to give me a crawling sensation on the back of my neck as I continued to drive on.  This sensation kept mounting for another minute or two, when suddenly there was a kind of whooshing sound in my spine and my consciousness shot up into the predawn sky like a rocket.  I found myself suspended in a shining bubble of perception.  I thought to myself that this bubble has in it the forces that cause us to be born in the body and mind of a human being and that normally we do not get consciously into it until we die.  But I was not in fact dead.  My mind had simply stopped and had been stretched into a single shining line or wire going up out of the top of my head where my body was still driving the car on sheer automatic instinct.  I discovered in fact that I could maintain enough awareness in the body for driving the car but stay centered in my bubble of perception in the sky.  I had become a double being!  One was driving a car and the other was floating in a higher dimension of existence.  I then realized that the two entities were helping me do this.  One was helping me keep enough consciousness to drive the car and the other was helping me keep consciously centered in the sky bubble of perception!

Later studies convinced me that my bubble of perception was what the Theosophists call the Causal Body and what the Nagual Seers call the Third Attention.  There in that state I felt I was touching the Rim of Eternity.

I woke my friend and found I could even talk without falling down out of my sky bubble.  I tried to explain what was happening, which quite blew his mind.  I pointed out that I was both alive and dead at the same time, that I am a double being and I was getting assistance from two inhuman beings sort of like angels.  I also pointed out (from the standpoint of my position in the sky bubble) that death as such is kind of sad due to unfulfilled desires, but not ultimately terrible or impossible to deal with because in our essence of consciousness in our higher bubble we are all rather sober, studious and simply trying to learn how to work out all the ultimate issues of life and death.  I further pointed out that it is mainly our physical body that fears death because it has the most to lose.

I stayed in this state for hours as I drove across northern Arizona.

A few years later when I first read Journey to Ixtlan I had some rather more horrifying experiences because they impinged heavily on the Second Attention of the dream or subtle body.  But that is another story.  I will, however, say right now that the Way of the Shaman deals mainly with the development of the Second Attention or subtle body whereas the Way of the Nagual deals mainly with the Third Attention or causal body.  Since the initial entrance of my consciousness into both developments thirty and thirty-five years ago, a lot of water has gone under the bridge of my presence in the human world on Earth with my physical body.

Double beings, potential Naguals, do in fact reside on our planet.  Not all of them are located in Mexico or America.  Not all of them become directly involved in the teachings of the New Seers of Mexico.  It is also a fact that there is a Fourth Attention of extraordinary importance.  To access the Fourth Attention requires teachings and energy transmissions along the lines of Vedanta and Kashmir Shaiva traditions of ancient and medieval India.  The Fourth Attention can make good use of the Third Attention of the Nagual and the Second Attention of the Shaman.  However, the Way of the Nagual does not understand or access the Fourth Attention, so it rejects it, but it understands the Second Attention and the Way of the Shaman, thus utilizing it as a subtle support platform for higher launches or “summersaults of thought to leap into the inconceivable”!  The Way of the Shaman however is quite ignorant of both the Third and Fourth Attentions, so it will try to pretend that all important developments have to do with dreaming practices in the Second Attention coupled with healing practices in the First Attention.  Without the sobriety and Love-of-the-Abstract that we find in a Nagual of the Third Attention, we discover that dreamer/healer Shamans overestimate their personal self-importance as highly enhanced and hyperemotional Tonals because they are unable to access the Third Attention or the Nagual.  A Shaman who does not become a Nagual will remain rather retarded on the level of their causal body coupled with feelings of occult self-importance.  They are the ones who hate it when they read articles like this one.

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, ancient Rajayoga describes beings like Naguals who are stuck in the Third Attention as Prakrtilaya, which means, “absorbed on the causal level of cosmic nature”.  As for those Shamans stuck on the dreamer/healer level of the Second Attention, they are described as Videha, which means, “able to rise into the subtle dreaming body beyond the physical body, but not able to rise higher”.  Videha means literally in Sanskrit, “bodiless”.  Current examples of this fixation can be found in the teachings of Robert Monroe and Paul Twitchell, who made the unfoldment of out-of-the-body-experiences (O.B.E) and astral travel the end-all and be-all of spiritual development.

Few personal power mongers these days want to understand all this, but the truth of all this is the truth of all this.