THE DREAM OF THE PLANET
A Toltec Wisdom Book - The Four Agreements | Don Miguel Ruiz
Three thousand years ago, there was a human just like you and who lived near a city surrounded by mountains. The human was studying to become a medicine man, to learn the knowledge of his ancestors, but he didn’t completely agree with everything he was learning. In his heart, he felt there must be something more.
One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say: “I am made of light; I am made of stars.”
He looked at the stars again, and he realised that it’s not the stars that create light, but rather light that creates the stars.
“Everything is made of light,” he said, “and the space in-between isn’t empty.”
And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information. Then he realised that although he was made of stars, he was not those stars. “I am in-between the stars,” he thought. So he called the stars the Tonal and the light between the stars the Nagual, and he knew that what created the harmony and space between the two is Life or Intent. Without Life, the Tonal and the Nagual could not exist.
Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything.
This is what he discovered: Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God.
Everything is God.
And he came to the conclusion that human perception is merely light perceiving light.
He also saw that matter is a mirror - everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light - and the world of illusion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn’t allow us to see what we really are. “The real us is pure love, pure light,” he said. This realisation changed his life.
Once he knew what he really was, he looked around at other humans and the rest of nature, and he was amazed at what he saw. He saw himself in everything - in every human, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, in the earth. And he saw that Life mixed the Tonal and the Nagual in different ways to create billions of manifestations of Life.
In those few moments he comprehended everything. He was very excited, and his heart was filled with peace. He could hardly wait to tell his people what he had discovered. But there were no words to explain it. He tried to tell the others, but they could not understand. They could see that he had changed, that something beautiful was radiating from this eyes and his voice. They noticed that he no longer had judgment about anything or anyone. He was no longer like anyone else. He could understand everyone very well, but no one could understand him. They believed that he was an incarnation of God, and he smiled when he heard this and he said, “It is true. I am God. But you are also God. We are the same, you and I. We are images of light. We are God.”
But still people didn’t understand him.
He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people, a mirror in which he could see himself. “Everyone is a mirror,” he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themselves. And he realised that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are.
They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke in between the mirrors.
And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light - the Dream of humans.
Then he knew that he would soon forget all that he had learned. He wanted to remember all the visions he had had, so he decided to call himself Smokey Mirror so that he would always know that matter is a mirror and the smoke in-between is what keeps us from knowing what we are. He said, “I am the Smokey Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognise each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer.”
What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake. Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change constantly.
Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or The Dream of The Planet. The dream of the planet I the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, it’s beliefs, laws, religions, different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events and holidays.
We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child’s attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.
Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of the things simultaneously, but busing our attention we can hold whatever we want to receive in the foreground of the mind.
Unity in Duality is a 6 week course that support you in stepping outside of the attentional filters of the mind back into your field awareness. Which allows you to be free, spontaneous and live with ease and joy. To rest into genuine (self) love, radical freedom, unbound expression & real truthfulness.
The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition.
That is the way we learned everything we know.
By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to be have in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong. It was all there already - all that knowledge, all those rules and concepts about how to behave in the world.
When you where in school, you sat in a little chair and put your attention on what the teacher was teaching you. It is the same dynamic with Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters: They were all trying to hook your attention. We also learn to hook the attention of other humans, and we develop a need for attention which can become very competitive.
Children compete for attention of their parents, their teachers, their friends. “Look at me! Look at what I’m doing! Hey, I’m here.” The need for attention becomes very strong and continues into adulthood. The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to believe, beginning with the language we speak.
Language is the code for understanding and communication between humans. Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement. Once we understand the code, our attention is hooked and the energy is transferred from one person to another.
It was not your choice to speak English.
We never had the opportunity to choose what we believe or what we not believe.
We never chose even the smallest of these agreements.
I call this process the domestication of humans.
The more we become aware of the dream we are operating in, the dream we are moment by moment constructing for ourselves, the more we can become free of this dream. Now we get to influence our lives in more useful, productive and loving ways. Attentional filters are always operating on a duality. A duality can become a polarity in which we find tension between the two seemingly opposite perspectives.
Unity in Duality is a 6 week course that support you in stepping outside of the attentional filters of the mind back into your field awareness. This course helps you to transcend and including dualistic perspectives, through intentional somatic practices & polarity integration. Which allows you to be free, spontaneous and live with ease and joy. To rest into genuine (self) love, radical freedom, unbound expression & real truthfulness.