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Of Toltecs and Mantises

Yesterday on my lunch break at work, I was out on the sidewalk in front of the Physical Education building. Something that looked like a leaf to my sleeping machine nevertheless drew me down to my knees. It was a praying mantis on its back. For about six months now I have come to see the praying mantis as the promise of my transformed self. This one was not moving. I saw no army of ants, though. Rather it was alone, so it was still alive. Then a kick and another kick.

I remembered the story Koyote the Blind told of Carlos Castaneda and how he picked up a snail that was crossing the road. Don Juan cursed him and told him he had just removed that snail's chance of work. Then Carlos put the snail back. Ay! Estupido! Now he had completely done him in. The only chance that snail had was to get back to the middle of the road by himself and start again. So I should not help this praying mantis do what it is evidently trying to do? Screw that! This is not just any story. This is me, my life. This is my life draining away or I wouldn't be here to witness it. I will not walk away as though it were someone else's responsibility. I will not live on my back and die on my back.

I used my pen to gently flip my body over. For the next hour I sat vigil over myself. Quite honestly, I don't understand anything I did. I am completely foreign to myself. In that body, I was engaged with something requiring my full concentration?that much I could see. For most of the time, I rested myself on the elbows of my crab-like claws, and worked on something at the very tail end of my abdomen. For a time in the middle, I used my back legs one at a time to knock my own abdomen, giving myself blows on either side intended to get something moving.

The monkey me wondered, do praying mantises give live birth? It looked as if a little one was trying to free itself from my other end, but that seemed impossible. I let my mind go because it was idle and irrelevant in this play. I simply put my attention forward to this voyager. The sidewalk bubbled and burbled and a fog surrounded my insect body, but my calm body was still except for its necessary movements. When the play clock rang time to pretend to return to the office, the human and the mantis bodies separated. Later, when I came back to the sidewalk, the little bulging-eye me was no longer there. Does it live? Does it die? Did it accomplish its purpose? I don't know. All that matters is that I keep pushing, keep pushing.

Right now, as I encounter my mantis self, Koyote the Blind is engaged in a Toltec storytelling called The Devilish Ones. The storytelling of Toltecs, or at least that of the Nagual who practices this art, is not ordinary, but a magical weaving of the multidimensional universe.

The entire Devilish Ones series is, in actuality, a single moment. Everything we seem to be doing now, seemed to be doing yesterday, and will seem to do tomorrow is divine play only. Some of us are learning to move with intent, to engage a purpose beyond the game of the ordinary world, and to keep pushing no matter what. This is an important moment.

"For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect. The Perfect and the Perfect are one perfect and not two; nay, are none!" (Book of the Law Ch. 1) If we begin to get lost in the movie again, if we once again surrender to our programming, this moment and all that it promises and all that we once promised would self-destruct.

*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.

 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.

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