5: Becoming Aware of the Toltec Universe

The next chapter is a light show, beginning with the author in the Sonoran desert contemplating stars. In a moment of perception, Don Miguel becomes aware that the universe is alive. Then in a perception shift, he sees that his body, like the universe he is contemplating, is infinite as well. And everywhere is the messenger of life (the force of the universe): light.

And our eyes are like mirrors reflecting that light. But behind the mirrors is a brain that interprets, qualifies, and judges that virtual reality of reflected light through accumulated knowledge. This is what the Toltecs called dreaming. God, the Universe, creates what is real. And we co-create our virtual reality.

The word Toltec means artist of the spirit and our ultimate art is our dream of life, our expression of the spirit. But there are two kinds of dreaming. There is dreaming without awareness, and there is the recovery of awareness and dreaming then with truth and love.

My aside. But be aware that awareness is more than knowing by thinking. (This may be the cornerstone truth and possibly the most difficult one to accept for those still caught in the mass web of scientific materialism.) Awareness is perceiving the universe with our wealth of feelings, with our entire being. It ‘sees’ that we are infinite, alive and filled with the light of the universe. We are more than human; that is just our collective story. We are truly the stuff of the mystic.

But our knowledge will attempt to invalidate our newfound awareness, because it threatens the very foundation of our everyday reality. That's why it takes courage to face our own lies. The structure of our knowledge makes us feel safe, even if it's untrue. So it can be very frightening as one recovers awareness: everything in one’s life loses meaning; nothing in one’s story seems important any longer.

But there is a way to rewrite the story of our life, to recover the structure of our belief, and rebuild it without those lies of knowledge. Life goes on as before but the lies no longer rule our life. And that 'way' will occupy the rest of the book. It is the way of Toltizian Dreaming. And this is its 4th truth: with knowledge we are dreaming our virtual reality; but with awareness we can direct that dream.