"You already know that this is the last task in which we will be together," he said. "You will enter into the nagual and the tonal by the force of your personal power alone. Genaro and I are here only to bid you farewell. Power has determined that Nestor should be a witness. So be it.
"This will also be the last crossroad of yours which Genaro and I will attend. Once you have entered the unknown by yourselves you cannot depend on us to bring you back, so a decision is mandatory. You must decide whether or not to return. We are confident that you two have the strength to return if you choose to do so. The other night you were perfectly capable, in unison or separately, to throw off the ally that otherwise would have crushed you to death. That was a test of your strength.
"I must also add that few warriors survive the encounter with the unknown that you are about to have; not so much because it is hard, but because the nagual is enticing beyond any statement, and warriors who are journeying into it find that to return to the tonal, or to the world of order and noise and pain, is a most unappealing affair.
"The decision to stay or to return is done by something in us which is neither our reason nor our desire, but our will. So there is no way of knowing the outcome of it beforehand.
"If you choose not to return, you will disappear as if the earth had swallowed you. But if you choose to return to this earth, you must wait like true warriors until your particular tasks are finished. Once they are finished, either in success or defeat, you will have the command over the totality of yourselves."

Carlos Castaneda: Tales of Power
 

„Tell me what else happened to Eligio,” I asked Nestor after they had calmed down again.
„After Eligio and Benigno jumped,” Nestor replied, „the Nagual made me look quickly over the edge, in order to catch the sign the earth gives when warriors jump into the abyss. If there is something like a little cloud, or a faint gust of wind, the warrior’s time on earth is not over yet. The day Eligio and Benigno jumped I felt one puff of air on the side Benigno had jumped and I knew that his time was not up. But Eligio’s side was silent.”
„What do you think happened to Eligio? Did he die?”
All three of them stared at me. They were quiet for a moment. Nestor scratched his temples with both hands. Benigno giggled and shook his head. I attempted to explain but Nestor made a gesture with his hands to stop me.
„Are you serious when you ask us questions?” he asked me.
Benigno answered for me. When he was not clowning, his voice was deep and melodious. He said that the Nagual and Genaro had set us up so all of us had pieces of information that the others did not have.
„Well, if that’s the case we’ll tell you what’s what,” Nestor said, smiling as if a great load had been lifted off his shoulders. „Eligio did not die. Not at all.”
„Where is he now?” I asked.
They looked at one another again. They gave me the feeling that they were struggling to keep from laughing. I told them that all I knew about Eligio was what dona Soledad had told me. She had said that Eligio had gone to the other world to join the Nagual and Genaro. To me that sounded as if the three of them had died.
„Why do you talk like that. Maestro?” Nestor asked with a tone of deep concern. „Not even Pablito talks like that.”
I thought Pablito was going to protest. He almost stood up, but he seemed to change his mind.
„Yes, that’s right,” he said. „Not even I talk like that.”
„Well, if Eligio didn’t die, where is he?” I asked.
„Soledad already told you,” Nestor said softly. „Eligio went to join the Nagual and Genaro.”
I decided that it was best not to ask any more questions. I did not mean my probes to be aggressive, but they always turned out that way. Besides, I had the feeling that they did not know much more than I did.
Nestor suddenly stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of me. Finally he pulled me away from the table by my armpits. He did not want me to write. He asked me if I had really blacked out like Pablito had at the moment of jumping and did not remember anything. I told him that I had had a number of vivid dreams or visions that I could not explain and that I had come to see them to seek clarification. They wanted to hear about all the visions I had had.
After they had heard my accounts, Nestor said that my visions were of a bizarre order and only the first two were of great importance and of this earth; the rest were visions of alien worlds. He explained that my first vision was of special value because it was an omen proper. He said that sorcerers always took a first event of any series as the blueprint or the map of what was going to develop subsequently.
In that particular vision I had found myself looking at an outlandish world. There was an enormous rock right in front of my eyes, a rock which had been split in two. Through a wide gap in it I could see a boundless phosphorescent plain, a valley of some sort, which was bathed in a greenish-yellow light. On one side of the valley, to the right, and partially covered from my view by the enormous rock, there was an unbelievable domelike structure. It was dark, almost a charcoal gray. If my size was what it is in the world of everyday life, the dome must have been fifty thousand feet high and miles and miles across. Such an enormity dazzled me. I had a sensation of vertigo and plummeted into a state of disintegration.
Once more I rebounded from it and found myself on a very uneven and yet flat surface. It was a shiny, interminable surface just like the plain I had seen before. It went as far as I could see. I soon realized that I could turn my head in any direction I wanted on a horizontal plane, but I could not look at myself. I was able, however, to examine the surroundings by rotating my head from left to right and vice versa. Nevertheless, when I wanted to turn around to look behind me, I could not move my bulk.
The plain extended itself monotonously, equally to my left and to my right. There was nothing else in sight but an endless, whitish glare. I wanted to look at the ground underneath my feet but my eyes could not move down. I lifted my head up to look at the sky; all I saw was another limitless, whitish surface that seemed to be connected to the one I was standing on. I then had a moment of apprehension and felt that something was just about to be revealed to me. But the sudden and devastating jolt of disintegration stopped my revelation. Some force pulled me downward. It was as if the whitish surface had swallowed me.
Nestor said that my vision of a dome was of tremendous importance because that particular shape had been isolated by the Nagual and Genaro as the vision of the place where all of us were supposed to meet them someday.
Benigno spoke to me at that point and said that he had heard Eligio being instructed to find that particular dome. He said that the Nagual and Genaro insisted that Eligio understand their point correctly. They always had believed Eligio to be the best; therefore, they directed him to find that dome and to enter its whitish vaults over and over again.
Pablito said that all three of them were instructed to find that dome if they could, but that none of them had. I said then, in a complaining tone, that neither don Juan nor don Genaro had ever mentioned anything like that to me. I had had no instruction of any sort regarding a dome.
Benigno, who was sitting across the table from me, suddenly stood up and came to my side. He sat to my left and whispered very softly in my ear that perhaps the two old men had instructed me but I did not remember, or that they had not said anything about it so I would not fix my attention on it once I had found it.
„Why was the dome so important?” I asked Nestor.
„Because that’s where the Nagual and Genaro are now,” he replied.
„And where’s that dome?” I asked.
„Somewhere on this earth,” he said.
I had to explain to them at great length that it was impossible that a structure of that magnitude could exist on our planet. I said that my vision was more like a dream and domes of that height could exist only in fantasies. They laughed and patted me gently as if they were humoring a child.
„You want to know where Eligio is,” Nestor said all of a sudden. „Well, he is in the white vaults of that dome with the Nagual and Genaro.”
„But that dome was a vision,” I protested.
„Then Eligio is in a vision,” Nestor said. „Remember what Benigno just said to you. The Nagual and Genaro didn’t tell you to find that dome and go back to it over and over. If they had, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be like Eligio, in the dome of that vision. So you see, Eligio did not die like a man in the street dies. He simply did not return from his jump.”

Carlos Castaneda: The Second Ring of Power