Heather Ash Amara asked:


“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

Imagine you have new eyes. From this new point of perception you see human beings not as skin, hair and flesh, but as energy.

Physically, we have two hands. But in an energetic sense we each have thousands of hands, which grasp at different agreements and beliefs. Each agreement is an energetic handshake. The hand at the other end may be attached to another human’s energetic hand, or even to an imaginary force.

People make agreements together, both consciously and unconsciously. Two people agree they will be monogamous. A woman getting a new job agrees she will follow company policy. A man stops at a red light. These are all agreements, individual and societal. They give our lives structure and form.

Many more agreements are unconscious and cause us great suffering. We compare ourselves to our siblings, to magazine and television images, to our parents. We agree with ourselves, “When I become a lawyer, I will be happy. If I never get divorced I will be okay. If I could just look like that person, or have her personality, or afford that car, I will be fulfilled, loved, an adult.” These agreements go beyond beneficial structure and form, to create invisible prisons that trap our creative spirits.

Some of these agreements are passed on to us from our parents: “Young ladies do not run. Never talk back to your elders. Boys do not cry.” Some are passed on from society: “If you have money you will be happy. Being single means being unhappy. Only doctors can heal illness.” Sometimes we consciously agree with our parents or our teachers or our priest, but the sponge of our unconscious minds soaks up many more agreements.

We may not see the agreements themselves, but we can see the results in the way we live our lives. To see the invisible agreements that orchestrate our every reaction, we must use new eyes to pierce the veil of physical manifestation. We must see underneath the created to the creative force.
Our greatest tool is focused imagination. When we give energy form in our imagination, our mind becomes a tool to transform any belief or agreement. Once the transformation (re-visioning) is complete, the energy follows new pathways, and our perceptions and reactions shift accordingly.

Imagine yourself again as an energetic being. Your thousands of arms stretch out to grasp the strings of thousands of balloons. Each balloon represents an agreement, and contains an energetic picture of the agreement. Some of these balloons you can see. Some you catch glimpses of when you turn your head. Others are behind you, or below the range of your gaze. Some you simply refuse to see. Whether known or hidden, your agreement balloons orchestrate how you will react to your surroundings and experiences. Every perception you have is through one of these balloon filters. They create your experience of the world. They give you a sense of safety from the unknown.

Now imagine what it would feel like to open every hand and release all of your balloons. For many people there is a feeling of immediate panic, and a frantic grabbing at their balloons. Other people feel a deep sense of freedom when they imagine opening their hands, but then unless the root cause is healed, they will soon be unconsciously grasping at balloons again.

These energetic hands exist because we believe we are not enough exactly as we are. We look outside of ourselves and say, “If I dress like Sally people will like me, too. If I never make a mistake, my parents will love me. Mistakes are bad.” When you make an agreement, you hand yourself a balloon and say “Here, hold this, it will keep you safe. Here, hold this because Daddy said to. Here, hold this because that person over there is holding one just like it.”

So tightly do we grasp our new balloons, that we soon forget why we are holding them. We begin to identify ourselves with them. It soon appears that our very personality is woven in with the strings of our agreements. When we begin to untangle the web of our self-image and beliefs, we see many sources.

The source of some agreements is common sense and important domestication: “I will share the food at dinner. I will not touch people’s genitals unless invited to. I will not harm animals or humans. I will not push peas up my nose.” This type of agreement helps us to live comfortably with others, and with ourselves.

The sources of many other agreements are unconscious signals between us and our parents, teachers, caretakers, or elders. We may carry beliefs that our parents carried, which we inherited energetically and unconsciously. You see that your mother is angry with men, and so you also take on that balloon. Your great, great grandparents were traumatized when forced to leave their community and homeland, and you unknowingly carry this trauma.

No matter where the core of an agreement stems from, once you agree to hold it, it becomes yours. Many of our most cherished agreements are not based on what mom and dad really wanted us to become or believe, but what we thought they wanted us to become or believe. Some agreements are made spontaneously from little incidents in our lives. You watch your older sister cry when she does not get invited to the prom, and, depending on your personality, you promise yourself, “I never want to go to the prom,” or, “My sister is stupid for being so emotional,” or, “I am going to make sure I get a date to my prom.”

The agreements we make up spontaneously can be incredibly creative, and also nonsensical. Sense or no, they drive our future choices. Even simple agreements can create pain, because all agreements are connected to primary agreements that say, “I am bad,” “I am unlovable,” “I am going to be abandoned.” Every little agreement we make can be twisted through one of our core filters, and reinforce our self-punishment and suffering. If one day you take the last of the mashed potatoes when someone else was waiting for them, suddenly your simple agreement, “I will share food at dinner” is dragged out and used as punishment: “See, you did not share. You are going to be abandoned.”

Rationally, we may laugh and say this does not make any sense. But at a deep level our victim self believes it. When it comes to core agreements, humans are not very creative. We all feed off of the same deep-seated fears. These are the collective neurosis of the modern human, which stems from a scarcity model of the universe. The Toltec call this neurosis the parasite, because it saps our energy.

If we believed there is an abundance of love, money, health, and beauty, and that we deserved to delight in this abundance, our secondary agreements would look different. Instead, our fear-based domestication limits us to two main filters of the victim or the judge (parasite). These two characters play their roles so seamlessly we have ceased to hear them distinctly. If we listen closely beneath all of our agreements, we can hear the twin seeds of our self-betrayal:

“You are not enough,” the voice of the judge says. “You are not as smart as your brother. You will never be good at that.”

“I am not enough,” the victim agrees. “I am too shy. I am too sensitive.”

“You are too much,” the voice of the judge announces. “You are too beautiful. You should not be smarter than your father.”

“I am too much,” the voice of the victim cries. “I am too loud. I am too happy. I am too big.”

The victim and judge use stories and endless comparisons to justify their position. The judge does not play fair. If it loses ammunition on one front, it switches sides.

A man struggles to overcome his shyness. “You are so timid,” someone told him long ago, and now his judge repeats this mantra over and over again. Desperate to quiet this critical voice, he stretches himself and goes to a theater class. There he discovers he actually likes to interact with people. In a moment of bravery, he introduces himself to a stranger in the grocery line. She glares at him, and then ignores him. “See,” the judge whispers, “You are too bold.” The next time he has the urge to speak to a stranger and hesitates, the judge will whisper (or berate) again, “You are too timid.”

When we believe this parasite, we sustain a whole forest of false beliefs about ourselves and other people. Even though our forest of balloons is made up of illusions, they become a very real prison, trapping our perceptions through channels of fear and lack. Our attention is hooked by false images, instead of being firmly anchored in the glory of our individual light.

If we make a mistake or come across an obstacle on our path, instead of asking ourselves, “How can this serve me?” We scan through our agreements and justify our core fears: “I am bad. I am unlovable. I am going to be abandoned. I am too much. I am not enough.” To escape from this pain, we strengthen our secondary agreements: “In order to be loved, I need to stronger. I must try harder to be stronger.” (“Yeah, you are not strong enough,” the judge growls. “I’m so weak, just like my mother,” the victim whimpers.) Energetically we hook our attention to, “I must be strong.” But this attention is a way to divert our awareness away from our main suffering. The energetic message is, “I must be strong so I will not feel unlovable.” This cycle is doomed to failure in the hands of the parasite.

The wisdom of the Toltec offers three masteries to guide you to unweave this tangled web of agreements and tame the chaotic tango of the victim and judge. The Mastery of Awareness, the Mastery of Transformation, and the Mastery of Love can be simplified into three words: Awake. Transform. Live. (Witness. Act. Be.)

In order to become free of the parasite and our limiting beliefs, we must first awaken to the dream we have created for ourselves. Only when we take responsibility for our dream, as messy and uncomfortable as it might be, can we then make new choices. Practicing a new choice leads to integration, and truly living instead of simply surviving. As we continue to practice new agreements based in love, we gradually let go of the beliefs that go against us and grab onto the balloons of new agreements.

Eventually these new ways of being in the world become automatic. We begin to not just practice new agreements, but to become them. This becoming frees us from the tyranny of our root fears, and the clutches of the parasite. We then become the bright light, shining a new way of being out into the world.



Lizanne

Courier 21 asked:


THEUN MARES

An Act of Survival

A recent article in The International Herald Tribune made a strong point about some of the social consequences of the present economic crisis:

“It was a Turkish businessman who warned of a “social crisis that we should keep in mind.” For when economies collapse, bad things happen. The beast comes to poor countries first, but the potential of social upheaval awaits the rich too. Think of the 1930s and the surge of communism and fascism. Recession-related strikes and demonstrations have already bedeviled France, Russia, and Britain. The riots that spread from Greece could be a foretaste of worse things to come.

“Marxism is back,” said Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash. “A young, educated person who can’t get a job looks about him and says ‘It’s the system’s fault, not mine.’ There are worries about a new wave of leftist violence in Europe, reminiscent of the Baader-Meinhof, Action Directe, and Red Brigades, which tortured Europe in the 1980s.

The world is sliding downhill fast, and no one can say if the rope will hold.”

If we look around us, it is clear that finding a new way to relate to the world is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Fuelled even more now by an economic crisis, this necessity has its roots in the breakdown of many aspects of our society, which have left people feeling more and more alienated and lacking a sense of meaning and purpose. The absence of meaning and purpose quickly leads to a loss of confidence. A lack of confidence, unless remedied quickly, leads to the decay and end of a society or civilisation. History has shown this throughout the ages in different parts of the world. We now witness this decay spreading, with almost every aspect of what we know as civilisation in decline, with natural resources in decline, with basic food and water in decline, and all of this impending collapse hastened and made more urgent by an imminent financial collapse.
It is a time when people are going to be thrown fully onto their own resources, as scant as these may be. And because of the scant nature of their resources, people will be forced to interact with others, to form groups, and to learn the skills necessary for relating in a meaningful and life-supportive manner.

Is it simply a question of being a pessimist or an optimist? Often these supposed choices are mostly just the two sides of the same coin. In other words, the pessimist bemoans the fact that that things are not what they were before, and also tends to feel like a victim. However, the optimist all too often has a naive belief that things will not change too much: “We’ll muddle through,” and “All’s well that ends well!” Neither approach really embraces change. It is often hard to leave behind the familiar, especially when there are no guarantees of what is going to happen next.

It is only when they are pushed by their circumstances to such an extent that they have their backs against the wall, that most people are prepared to take their chances and go for the new, simply because it is an act of survival.

What is the foundation for the new?

The foundation is an acknowledgement of the interrelationship of all of life, and therefore the need to co-operate intelligently with all of the many facets of life that surround and impact upon one.

The Toltec teachings on the Warrior’s Path are based upon a deep and practical knowledge of relationships, and it is the re-evaluation of all the relationships within our lives, and so learning the meaning of intelligent co-operation, that will form the foundation for the new. Whether this is the relationship between members of a family, between employer and employees, between government and the people, man and the environment. With the correct understanding of the principles of relationships, and the knowledge of how to put these into practice, the new can evolve.

In learning to handle everything that is happening, an important principle is to learn how to bring everything back to the self, as opposed to being self-centred.

Self-centred is, “Aw! Why is this happening to ME!? I don’t deserve this! It is all the fault of X, or Y, or Z. You must sort them out! Just let me be in peace!”

The approach of bringing things back to the self is, “I accept my own responsibility for whatever has happened. Now, never mind WHY all this happened, the question is WHAT can I learn, and HOW can I use that to my advantage and that of those around me?” In other words, “I am both the cause, as well as the solution.”

The self-centred approach is disempowering and not life-supportive. The second is highly empowering to ALL, and is totally life-supportive.

At the core of the Toltec approach is learning to live in a life-supportive way. How to be a responsible human being, so that you are acting in harmony with your own inner being, and therefore co-operating fully in the unfoldment of your fate. This implies also learning to relate fully to yourself, to other people, to the world around you. Relating fully implies a lot more than just tolerating, or co-existing – it implies first and foremost that you have a deep understanding that you have a unique role to play in life, a knowledge of what that role is, and how to fulfil it. However, it is a strange quirk of human nature that it often takes an act of survival to discover this.

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Toltec-legacy is Theun’s online Teaching facility. This new website comprises a substantial public section, with a lot of useful resource material. However, at the heart of the website is a unique and vast teaching facility that includes, not only all of the material in Théun’s books, but also articles and experiences from apprentices who have been working with the teachings in their daily lives, guidance given by Théun to participants in his  retreats, as well as a very substantial volume of guidance he has given over the past 8 years to a group of people all over the world, working intensely with him on an e-forum.

As one might expect from Théun, in addition to the substantial material and guidance, the new website is absolutely stunning in its beauty and presentation. It leads the visitor though a true experience comprising rich and deeply symbolic graphics, as well as a live musical score that has been specifically created for us.

As you know, Théun’s work is intensely practical, and the new website will offer the sincere seeker of knowledge the opportunity of learning to work with the Toltec teachings in the context of their daily lives, and also to receive ongoing feedback and guidance. It is especially appropriate to these times when more and more people are being thrown onto their own resources, and are searching for a new forward. Will they choose for victimhood, or will they choose for a new way of being?

The new website is at www.toltec-legacy.com I hope you enjoy it!



Willa