I look all around,
at the cleansing of nature,
the meeting of times.
What is happening?
The birth-pangs of Mother Earth.
The coming of Light.
What’s our charge in this?
Present in the shifting dream,
to witness and steer.
I look all around,
at the cleansing of nature,
the meeting of times.
What is happening?
The birth-pangs of Mother Earth.
The coming of Light.
What’s our charge in this?
Present in the shifting dream,
to witness and steer.
The god-fearing are victims of their ignorance. Ignorance is not knowing who you truly are. Ignorant of their true nature, they believe the little gods of their imagination have created them. The more they fear, the more they channel the force of fear to create a world full of evidence that they are powerless. They become trapped by the power of their own ignorance. The gods they created are placed as guardians of their prison.
The free human being does not draw from the power of fear.
The people of knowledge, free from ignorance, do not hold guards to keep them trapped. They are free from belief, and free from fear.
Picture yourself in the middle of a sentient universe, a conscious being who reaches within because there is nothing outside. It reaches within. It folds upon itself, exploring different levels of sentience until energy is manifested and matter is formed. I want you to picture that as a process of folding upon itself and unfolding out into experience.
This sentience is going within to know itself. It is perceiving itself on different levels, as pure intelligence, then as sound, and then as light. After becoming light, this supreme being experiences itself as cosmos, as galaxies, and finally as planetary existence.
It is not that it is creating sound and then it creates light, and then it creates stars, and then it creates planets, and then it creates things. It’s more that every layer is itself and it has a continuous unfolding of consciousness—knowing itself at different levels.
To give an example of how this is a continuum you may consider the nature of matter itself. Everything that we call matter is composed of atomic particles, and each atom is composed of subatomic particles, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. Each one of these particles is a packet of energy, a vibration that exists for a time. The relationship between these particles is what creates what we know as the material world.
From the moment when there is light in the Universe, this same light has been coming together as vibration creating stars, creating galaxies, creating planets, creating moons, people, plants, animals, rocks and everything. There is no substantial difference between matter and energy. It is all a continuum. Matter is slowed down energy. The only distinction between matter and energy is in our conception of it, how we relate to it, how we think of it, but it is all part of the same continuum.
In that same way, there is no real difference between the mind of God and the physical universe. It is all a continuum of sentience.
In the midst of a massacre, we were laying down at Hell’s gate, waiting for death.
Looking up, I saw a peaceful blue sky far above us. My ankle was throbbing from a shot wound, right where an asp had bit me in a dream days earlier.
Like lightning inside the head, the realization that all states are already in me struck.
This bolt of light showed me the opening across the dream beyond which lies the path of mastery of perception.
The undifferentiated silence becomes distinct by the introduction of sound and movement. Having forgotten infinite lifetimes, this new appearance of appearance, grabs the attention.
I begin to forget the eternal emptiness. I hear the laughter. I feel the love of the mother. I touch with my tiny hands, and the touch is joyous in the extreme. I experience searing pain and suffering, and the suffering is like fire innundating all my senses. I laugh. I hope. I experience. I become.
In the becoming I transform myself. I create many me’s from expectation, arrogance, and hopefulness. I create the illusion of suffering. I create the illusion of the importance of my life. I create even the fiction of a spiritual path––the reading of the books, the listening to the teachers. I create an expectation of liberation. I create the fiction of salvation. I create aspirations. And in the creation of aspirations I immerse myself more and more in the illusion that what happens to me is somehow of any importance whatsoever.
And so on I continue with the chain,
the unending chain of life,
enlightenment,
and nothingness.
Nothing is permanent.
Not even the experience of the empty
voidness of the void.
Life runs out.
Death runs out.
Ignorance runs out when I realize
the eternal truth of the eternal empty void.
And the experience of enlightenment
and the dissolution of illusion
also ends with the forgetting of the illusion.
It ends with the stirring of experience.
Unending chain.
A cosmic breath between creation and dissolution.
The long night of Brahma.
The eternal dance of the empty void and her beloved, her lover,
the stirring of the experience.
Today, there is no volcano in my view.
No people.
No path.
No city.
No hum.
Today it’s just the fog
holding and dissolving billions of worlds.
They have become more clear and solid.
They exist within me, and without.
The word showing an external reality is no longer dead.
It’s the gate keeper who is dead.
Who, then, punishes the archangels?
Or do they exist inside me in caravans?
Do they exist in my grandmother’s room,
collecting dust and gathering consciousness of little children?
Does the manticore fly?
Does the unicorn travel on solar paths?
Is the man in the cross still there,
looking at me with those eyes,
asking me if I know that I am there
nailed to the same cross,
to this creation of my mind,
unable to move and going everywhere at once?
Imagine all events of the universe already laid out as a finite multidimensional field. Now, imagine God’s consciousness entering a point in this matrix of events. This point of consciousness now begins to experience events in sequence. The sequence followed becomes experience, and with that comes the concept of time.
With the accumulation of experiences comes a sense of self born out of the memories that I can see behind me. I also sense the field of events around me and ahead of me, not clear to my vision but I sense they exist ahead of me, in my future. When I place my attention on the future, I project what I know onto it. What I know is born out of my past. This is how I create my sense of past and future.
Now, when I turn my attention to my past, I have to choose what events I remember and which ones I emphasize. I tell a story to myself about my passage, and the way in which I tell this story determines what I leave out and what I underline. I can only do this story telling from the perspective of an author.
I am the author. But I am not a fixed, limited author. I am creating myself each time I see my past, and every time I project my story onto a future. I create myself according to the story I weave, and I weave my story out of the material at hand (i.e., the memories available to me).
So, my sense of self is created not only from the passage of memories, but also from how I weave these memories and how I project them onto the field of possible futures.
The main reason your instrument, your carriage, your human biological machine does not get into the waking state is because it is deathly afraid of it. When everything is working properly, the Master expresses his wishes, the driver knows the direction and controls the horses, the horses have the strength to go wherever the Master indicates, and the carriage simply follows. When everything is working in harmony, the Master gets to where he wills to go. If something goes wrong, then he might not get to where he wants to go. If the wheels are not attached correctly, the carriage will go nowhere. If the horses are not well trained, the carriage could go anywhere. If the horses are going crazy, berserk, they will not go anywhere. If the driver is drunk or asleep, it can’t get anywhere either. The nature of our sleep refers a lot to the driver falling asleep. The driver falls asleep and the horses go to where they want to go according to their preferences, their instincts.
Who are the horses, the driver, the cart? The horses represent your desires and your fears; or more properly said, your seductions and your aversions. When the driver is asleep, you are on autopilot and you move in accordance to your instincts. You are driven by the winds of karma. Some of the words I use here, you might be familiar with, but I will be using them in different ways. Here, I’m not using karma to mean “you do something good, you get something good.” That’s the soap-opera version of karma. Think of karma as a wind that moves the leaves of the tree sometimes here, sometimes there. We are like those leaves, and we’re moved by our desires and the circumstances around us.
Rarely do we have a driver that can direct our vehicle wherever we want to go. The driver is our conscious self, the thinking part of us that can plan, strategize, and make thoughtful decisions. A driver that is pulled and repelled by sensual or emotional attractions, is a driver that has given control of the vehicle to the horses. The driver is asleep, or otherwise merely witnessing the car being pulled by the horses of emotional identification. The driver might know where the master wishes to go, but he is incapable of directing the carriage.
The influence of the Master is very subtle. He has no direct influence over the cart. All he can do is talk and send a voice to the driver. But if the driver is drunk and asleep, he won’t listen. If there is a racket going on outside, he might get a distorted notion. All he has is that voice coming from somewhere behind him: “Take me to the park.” But the driver has to interpret, apply the command, and go. You have to listen to the voice while awake. If you are asleep, who knows what you’re listening to.
From The Teachings of a Toltec Survivor
Think of a dream you are having. You project yourself into that dream. That projection is a double of you, an avatar that is native to the dream environment. You are creating both the dream and the dream self that inhabit that realm.
If you identify with that double, you act and feel as if that is your only reality.
To be aware of both the dream and the one who is outside the dream allows you to loose your form, and to exist beyond the limits of your dream.
To withdraw your identification from the dream double is to wake up, and to find yourself in the wake world–which itself as a dream to the eternal void beyond all dreaming and experience.
The being who says “I am”, implied in every sentence, the being that observes, that hears, that sees color and light, sits in the shadows between the worlds.
If I look within the source of attention, trying to find the I Am, the I Am retreats even further. When I think I’ve grappled it, when I think I have surrounded the I Am in a web craftily and carefully constructed with meaning and concerns, when I say “Ah! Here I Am!,” the I Am becomes smaller, more remote, more in shadow.
I look for the I Am, realizing that the one who searches is also the I Am, forever retreating yet always at the center of the experience.