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Root of My Violence: An Encounter with the Naual

I just got off the phone with a member of my family. The conversation took thirty minutes and I ended it midstream because I had paid my honors and it was going into the second ring of its eddy and I had a date with myself in my temple.

The conversation was of a nature of me bearing witness to a birth of new consciousness within the ordinary world. This was a process of coming into a more authentic ordinary identity for this family member.

As I mostly listened my way through the discovery this person was going through about themselves in relation to power within the world, I found myself wriggling like a bug on a pin. I witnessed myself trying to fall asleep like crazy. I saw my violence. So many times I wanted to snip at this innocent person or to freak out and make a stink about how busy I am, which is irrelevant. If nothing else, I would tune her out and then that part of me that owes a debt of engagement with this being and this character would exert its will to actually listen to the person. It was an arm wrestling contest between my ego, which was ready to kill anyone who forced it to engage in human conversation, and the will of my essence to engage in accordance with my duty to my family member.

So I learned through my engagement with Koyote's Telling* tonight that the root of my violence is a paranoid hatred of all things human. In other words, my ego fears identification with the human as if it were torture. That was how I felt just by forcing myself to listen compassionately to this innocent. I felt that I was completely invisible to this other and I felt terror at that invisibility. The vampire has no reflection.

Somehow my ego must have developed in the presence of the naual because it identified itself with that unknown even though it can never be that. I must have had an exposure at a critical time in childhood.

But I never saw this about myself before now. When I was young I knew I hated humanity, but I thought it was because humanity was stupid and cruel. Now I am training myself to love humanity just as a way of waking up. It is torture.

My resistance to human identity is really resistance to the Great Work.

*The Telling is a 9th century Toltec art form performed on Thursdays at 7:30 PM at 3485 University Ave. off Lemon St., Riverside, CA 92501 by Koyote the Blind, a Toltec Man of Knowledge. The current series is titled On Death.

 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