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Language Game of the Toltecs

In the ongoing game of red versus blue, of that-which-seeks-to-undo-the-System versus the System, the Toltecs are among those warriors of chaos, of subversion, of freedom.

The System refers to that which seeks conformity-by-the-numbers. It includes all of the institutions that promote unconscious agreement with certain beliefs and behaviors. For simplicity, we can think of it as the collective dream of the world, an illusion designed to dominate our waking and our dreaming alike.

Language and the word is a major battleground between the red and the blue teams. The System blue team uses the word always to refer to something else outside of itself, always to create an inside and an outside, always to create a sense that "I am" separate and different from everything else.

In school, a primary training ground of the System, we are taught to write about, to talk about something else. The model of learning is to sit in a small room and look at marked pieces of paper or look at colored, moving dots on a screen, interpreting them as if something is happening somewhere else. The attention is directed away from the body, away from the moment, away from the present. Movement is discouraged and seating is regimented as if from the outside. Punishment and reward habituate the students and replace responsibility with manipulation and control. That which has the potential to develop true will atrophies, while the attention is drawn in all directions and the life force siphoned away through uncontrolled eruption of emotions. All of these conditions are encoded in language practices that alienate the speaker from what is spoken about and from the act of speaking. Things that can be talked about, including "myself," are always outside, to control or be controlled. Relations of domination and submission are mandated by the System’s language game.

Unconscious emotions are the key weapon of the System against any, such as the Toltecs, who would attempt to wrest themselves from the all-pervasive grip. Unconscious emotions are made possible by personal identities, by accepting a language game in which "I" exist. When we are born and while we are very young, our sense of “I” is continuous and unrestricted. At some point we allow ourselves to be browbeaten into pretending to be someone with preferences, opinions, and fixed beliefs. We do this in exchange for a sense of order or a sense of security or a sense of love.

Once the self-betrayal is committed and we believe that our mask is who we are, the triggers for unconscious emotions are in place. All you have to do is insult "me" or disagree with "me" and the idea that I am threatened automatically evokes a reaction. A disruption of energy rolls through my body and is interpreted in terms of a narrow set of emotional categories programmed into me by my culture. Depending on my beliefs, I respond accordingly, carrying out a program without any intent to do so, wasting precious energy and substances that I could have used to carry out my purpose for this incarnation.

The Toltec red team subverts this programmatic use of language and automatic generation of emotion. Reality is recognized as dynamic, fluid, multi-layered, alive. Words are used as technology to direct energy, to create with sound, to express intentional mood. Gesture, movement, and emotion must support word in order to move with intent, in order to find a way, which is what the Toltec is always doing. “I” is nothing but a bare center of consciousness and may accumulate and shed identities and bodies just as quickly as a sorcerer can move through the multi-verse. The language of the Toltecs demands presence and resists attempts to siphon emotional energy away for the production needs of System. The language of the Toltecs demands that each one direct his or her own inner universe according to will.

Hablador (Master Toltec Storyteller) Koyote the Blind has called his own language-based art of the Telling as "the sound that makes." With every performance, he exercises the primal creative power of the Word, referring to nothing outside itself, encompassing and creating the unknown universe.

The Telling is a 10th-century Toltec art form performed on Thursdays at 7:30 PM Pacific Time at 3485 University Ave. off Lemon St., Riverside, CA 92501 and at www.justin.tv/koyote93 by Koyote the Blind, a Toltec Man of Knowledge.

 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