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Dreaming from the Heart: Navigation of the Shaman

Dreaming is the navigation of the Shaman. It is a way of seeing that sees everything in its field at once, like the way the ocean covers the Earth, a horizon that does not signify an end. The periphery is the center and the center, the periphery. In the Dreaming, everything is backward.

Dreaming of the Shaman is from the heart. Dreaming of the Shaman is of the emotions. Steering and moving through dream spaces by way of the emotions requires the ability to generate mood at will.

How does mood allow the Shaman to steer and navigate? Mood create emotions; emotions create fragrances in the higher dimensions; fragrances evoke spaces, chambers, specific configurations of being.

Have you ever heard that someone "created a stink" when he heard about something that made him angry? In the higher dimensions, anger—and particularly unconscious anger—can be smelled. Anxiety can be smelled. Gratitude can be smelled. Every emotion, whether or not humans have invented a name for it, can be smelled. Each smell is linked with a particular chamber in the higher dimensions.

This is the reason that incense has long been a tool of the magician, the invocant, the ritualist. Scent is magical. Although the ability of scent to evoke memories has long been noted and has its place too in the Shaman’s tool belt, we are not here referring to scent as a personal trigger, but rather scent as an objective property, a defining characteristic of a certain state of consciousness and being. Yes, scent is magical.

So scent makes space, emotions make scent, and Dreaming makes emotions.

To project from the heart with substance can transform and ordinary happening to an eternal moment. Substance is something physical. Substance is something in the body that has a corresponding effect in a higher dimension. Aka Dua is one such substance. It is becomes part of the body, inseparable from it. When activated with intentional mood, through Dreaming, it contributes much to those magickal moments when everything familiar is new, different, transformed, transported. There are other such substances as well.

Dreaming is not confined to the horizontal sleep, but is an aspect of the developed self that is available at any moment to one who has developed it or who has a natural gift. The Dreamer is she who has the capacity to be in non-ordinary spaces and to move intentionally within them. This can happen while the body is asleep and it can happen while the body is awake. Dreaming is an aspect of the consciousness of the shaman, and thus of reality.

Although mass consciousness certainly contains the element of the Dreaming, manipulated constantly through television, radio, music, and architecture, the Dreaming of the Shaman—at least of the Toltec Shaman—concerns the inner world. According to Toltec Man of Knowledge Koyote the Blind, one of the first skills learned by the Toltec Dreamer is simply to wake up in the dream, to become aware that one is dreaming. Perhaps the second is to do nothing. Do nothing! Don’t fly. Don’t walk through walls. Just be still and allow the dream to progress of its own accord. Instead, maintain awareness of self. Master self. That is the true mastery of the Dreamer.

For Koyote the Blind’s teaching on the Art of Dreaming, a DVD workshop is available on The Tequihua Foundation’s website

 Eric N. Peterson is a Toltec priest and member of The Tequihua Foundation, a Riverside, Southern CA nonprofit whose mission is to continue the ancient consciousness-transforming arts of the Toltecs. The Aka Dua is an energy prepared by a particular Toltec line. The Aka Dua assists in the alchemical process of transformation by which an ordinary human becomes the shaman.

www.tequihuafoundation.org