The Teachings of Don Juan 7. The Fire from Within

This is the highest of the new seers' goals. And not every warrior attains it. We believe that the nagual Julian didn't attain it. He was waylaid, and so was la Catalina."
He further said that to be a peerless nagual, one has to love freedom, and one has to have supreme detachment. He explained that what makes the warrior's path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the life situation of modern man. He said that modern man has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom.
"To be given a chance to go back again to the mystery of the world," don Juan continued, "is sometimes too much for warriors, and they succumb; they are waylaid by what I've called the high adventure of the unknown. They forget the quest for freedom; they forget to be unbiased witnesses. They sink into the unknown and love it."

"Warriors prepare themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when there is no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are nothing do they become everything."

"A nagual is someone flexible enough to be anything," he had said. "To be a nagual, among other things, means to have no points to defend.

"What happens after warriors are defeated?"
"They either regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the ranks of the petty tyrants for life."

Five of them are called the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, timing, and will.

Don Juan explained then that his use of the term "Toltec" did not correspond to what I understood it to mean. To me it meant a culture, the Toltec Empire. To him, the term "Toltec" meant "man of knowledge."