The Greatest Gift: You Are Dreaming
When the Toltecs teach “You are dreaming,” they are not talking about something the school bully said when you told him you would beat him up if he didn't leave you alone, or what you mother might have said when you told her you wanted to be an astronaut. “You are dreaming” is the greatest gift that the Toltecs have given the world. If you understand this amazing reality, your life will never be the same.
You Are Not Seeing What Is “Out There”
There is more to the mystery of the light than you have learned so far. The light is the living messenger that reflects off the tonal (creation) and brings the message of that aspect of the tonal to your eyes. Remember that illustration in your high school physics book, with the tree and the eyeball, that showed that the light bounces off the tree and comes to the eye?
The light is a perfect messenger. Light passes into the eye and makes an image (upside down, by the way) on the back of your eye. The parts of the eye called rods and cones translate that light image into nerve impulses that travel into the brain and create a little virtual-reality image of the tree in your mind. When you “see” the tree, you are actually looking at that virtual reality in your mind. You are not seeing the tree “out there” at all.
Your Mind Distorts the Light
When the light reflected from an object enters your eye, it travels through channels of perception in your mind. All of your life you have been creating belief systems, collecting opinions, experiencing fears, and making agreements about the world and how it works. You have stored all of that information in the channels of perception in your mind. If your mother said to you, “Your father's a bum and he never comes home. All men are alike,” you stored that as a memory somewhere in your channels of perception.
When the light is reflected off an object in creation and enters your eye, it has brought you the perfect message of what is out there. However, when that light enters those channels of perception in your mind, it picks up all the stored memories (old light) in those channels — and the message is distorted! When the light reaches that place in your mind where the virtual reality is created, it has been distorted by the addition of countless pieces of light stored as language, memories, beliefs, assumptions, agreements, emotions, knowledge, and more. Toltecs call this distorted virtual reality the “dream.”
Imagine that your mother did say your father was a bum, and all men are alike. As a child, you saw your father, and that stored light distorted your image of him. Even if you became a father yourself, that distorting light is still there. Perhaps you feel guilty about being a father or a man, and don't really know why. If you are a woman, and heard that message as a child, perhaps you can recognize how it has distorted your relationships with men and fathers. You cannot see the world as it is when you are distorting it with the stored light in your mind.
Your Mind Never Stops Dreaming
The process of distorting the light into a virtual reality continues day and night. The Toltecs knew that there is no way to see what is really out in the world, because the light must come into your brain for you to see it. In the process, it is always distorted.
The idea of “light” can be expanded to include the information collected by all of your senses — each one responds to a different frequency in the spectrum. In addition to your eyes, your organs of taste, touch, hearing, and smell collect data from the world around you. They are your “organs of perception.”
The image you see as a virtual reality in your mind is not what is out there as “the world.” The pure message in the light has been distorted by your mind according to your particular collection of stored data in your channels of perception. Your unique virtual reality is what the Toltecs call your “personal dream.”
Remember that all the information your organs of perception collect is a perfect message about what is out there in the world. Unfortunately, your mind is an organ of dreaming — or you could call it an “organ of deception”! Your mind distorts the information into a dream, and then looks at that little personal dream inside your mind and tells you that it is seeing the world. If you believe your mind, you will be very confused about the world. Perhaps you have already noticed that.
At night when you are sleeping, and your organs of perception have stopped collecting information from outside, your mind continues to dream. It simply uses all its stored light to create images. Every image in your night dreams, no matter how strange or bizarre they seem, comes from a lifetime of memories, emotions, and other forms of stored light.
Take some time now to consider these ideas about distorting the light. Write down some ways you might be distorting your friends, family, world events, and even yourself, based on opinions, fears, and other light stored in your channels of perception. Be gentle with yourself if you write “bad” things. It is your dreaming mind writing, not really you.
