Spinning with the Ally

The Artist’s Shattering and Rebirth

“Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. The price is to shatter the known, to destroy the comforting illusions of the tonal, and to be born again into the unknown.”
— Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power

In Tales of Power, Carlos Castaneda describes a moment of total transformation—a point at which the apprentice sorcerer surrenders control, loses form, and spins with the ally. This isn’t poetic metaphor; it’s a visceral description of what happens when a human being steps beyond the ordered world of thought (what Castaneda calls the tonal) and into the vast, unknowable realm of the nagual—a force of raw energy, perception, and being.

To spin with the ally is to undergo annihilation—not death in the literal sense, but the destruction of one’s old identity, categories, and modes of perception. What returns from that spinning is something new: not a thinker or observer, but a being who sees directly, who acts without the mediation of inner dialogue, who lives art as a state of being rather than a product to be made.

This experience may sound esoteric, but we can see its imprint in the lives of great artists—those who did not merely theorize about creativity, but who passed through fire and emerged changed, permanently.

Stephen Dedalus and the Shattering of the Chandelier

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character of Stephen Dedalus—Joyce’s literary stand-in—spends much of the novel trapped in the tonal. Aesthetics, philosophy, and irony are his armor. He perceives the world not as it is, but through a web of references, hesitations, and self-consciousness.

But then comes Circe, the book’s hallucinatory Nighttown episode. Reality collapses into chaos, memories mutate into living spirits, and Stephen is pulled into a vortex of guilt, shame, and ancestral weight. And then—it happens.

“(He lifts his ashplant, smashes a chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)”

The chandelier shatters. The mechanism of the "thought of thought" is destroyed. Stephen doesn’t just break a light fixture—he breaks through. This is spinning with the ally: a violent, total rupture that frees him from the prison of reflection. When he collapses afterward, it is not a failure but a necessary physical recovery. He has been reborn.

Minus and the Broken Body

In Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, it is not Karin—the sister descending into madness—but her brother Minus who undergoes the true transformation. After watching his family disintegrate, and being emotionally abandoned by his father, Minus experiences his own shattering:

“I was broken into tiny little pieces, and then put back together again.”

He doesn’t elaborate on the how. He doesn’t need to. What matters is that Minus no longer speaks about love or understanding as ideas—he now embodies them. His breakthrough isn’t dramatic like Stephen’s; it’s quiet, internal, but no less total. He steps into the nagual, and now he can feel what he could previously only describe.

Joyce and Bergman: Artists of the Nagual

These aren’t just fictional characters. Stephen is Joyce, and Minus is Bergman. What happens to them in their stories is a reflection of what happened to their creators in life.

• Joyce’s early work is marked by tight structure, self-conscious brilliance, and detachment. But after Ulysses, and especially in Finnegans Wake, he no longer writes about perception—he writes perception itself. He has smashed the chandelier and now lives in the ruins, building something wholly new.

• Bergman’s early films are beautiful, composed, and often literary. But beginning with the so-called “Faith Trilogy” (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence), he shifts. The language dissolves, the images become the emotion. He no longer constructs stories—he transmits experience.

Neither man returns to the tonal. They live in their art. They do not balance thought and being—they have transcended the need to. There is only the work, and the work is the self, unfiltered.

The Ally Awaits

Castaneda warns: not everyone survives spinning with the ally. Many are shattered and do not return. But those who do are never the same. They become artists not by crafting technique but by being remade. They no longer think about life. They live it—and their art is the natural overflow of that state.

This is the price of freedom. And the reward.