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Toltec Wisdom on The Tonal

The Toltecs in the ancient, sacred city of Teotihuacan saw this world in which we live as a very minor part of creation. They described the world as the island of the Tonal. Everything that is in this world: all the objects, all the physical elements, mental, emotional, social, historical?everything was said to be part of this island. Another way of thinking about the Tonal is that it is the known and the knowable.

The opposite of the Tonal is the Nahual. The Nahual exists outside the perimeter of the island of the Tonal. Anything we can name, point to, or remember is governed by the laws of the Tonal: family, job, my identity, and social norms are part of the Tonal. The spiritual work that we are exposed to is part of the Tonal as well. The ideas we have about God, the religious rituals, prejudices, and beliefs?they are part of the world of the Tonal. Anything we can give a name to, anything we have a shape for, is part of the Tonal.

The Nahual is outside all that.

You can manipulate the objects of the Tonal. You can move them around. You can rearrange the Tonal. You can do many things with the Tonal. But you only have what is already there to work with.

Imagine the objects of this room are the Tonal. We can move it, hide it, but we can never, ever taken anything out of or bring anything into it, including our physical bodies. That would be what we call the Tonal, the world. Sometimes we think of the world as the totality of beings and things and events of this planet. Realize, however, that this is an imaginary concept. When you think about the world, there is something in your imagination that responds to that. Yet the planet that is out there, a lot of that is unknown, yet we speak of it as if it is known.

Let me try to say that in a different way. If I tell you I used to have a dog, what image comes to our mind? Each one of you has a different image. I would also venture to say there are other things assumed with that.

For instance, you might come to think that I like dogs. You might also come to induce from that statement that maybe I played with that dog. That the dog grabbed my brother?s face and ripped if off would not come to your mind unless I mention it. And if I do, you would assume that I was sad and not that I laughed. That didn?t really happen.

I?m trying to make you see that with a simple phrase like that, a whole vision is in your mind. It is accepted and transmitted, and you also assume that everyone has heard the same thing. That?s because we are all familiar with the world, a world of beings, a world where we all understand what a dog is. But this world is mostly imaginary. Not because my dog was imaginary, but because your image of my dog was imaginary. More than that, my memory of my dog is also imaginary.

You can try this simple experiment. You see someone in front of you, someone you know well: mom, spouse, dog. If you look at them with attention, you will begin to see their face. When you see their real face, there?s going to be a slight shock to you because at first you are seeing, not their face, but your memory of that face. And when you remove that, you begin to see something strange there. When you try to do this with a small kid, you begin to feel guilty. Why? Because there is a programming in us that socializes us to take care of that kid in a certain way. There is of course the biological instinct to do something with the growing of that kid. We also have a protective mechanism to see everything around us as familiar. When you begin to see the child as something unknown or unrelated, there is panic, fear, guilt. When you see him like that, your relationship to him becomes different. When it?s not the socially accepted, it is uncomfortable.

Those of you who have had memories of past lives and who realize, for instance, that your father now used to be your wife, husband, or child, you can handle that because you are dealing with slight memories. But it would be very hard if you were to look at that being in the way it was. To look at that being in the way she is right now, to handle that influx of information, you need to grow.

When we are born, the brain comes already with a program that has been in place for thousands of years. Beneath that is a layer of programming that has been in place for millions of years. On top of all of that there is all the socialization that has taken place. We are programmed into this conventional world that we share. By conventional world, I mean society out there. When you come here from home, when you enter this room, you will expect everyone to be dressed. You have attained a certain latitude in style, whereas in older times there would be an expectation of more conformity, and in still other times more latitude than today. And you don?t even have to think about it. It was assumed. And it would remain hidden unless somebody or everybody was naked when you came in. It is because we share that world that I can share with you, ?When I was a boy, I had a dog,? and you think it?s a meaningful sentence. What is courteous and how to behave is programmed.

And then we begin to create our own programs, in other words, our personality. Usually the personality we create is not unique to us. We copy it. We copy a few archetypes of that. The combination is unique, but the archetypes we grabbed are not that many. We begin to apply one program to when we are in school, another to when at work, another in a safe situation, and another in an unsafe situation.

When a baby is born, they have a brain full of neural connections ready to take on the programming. It has a lot not touched. The baby begins by not having a fixed world. It does have a Tonal, but it is elusive, not fixed. The delimitations between the Tonal and the Nahual are ephemeral at best and the child is moving between this world and other possible worlds.

We begin to concentrate the attention of that child to this world with our teachings and what we allow the child to see and the world is consolidated. The way this happens is physical, by pruning and by getting rid of neural connections. There is constant pruning for five to seven years. The baby begins to eliminate parts of his brain because he has to have what is necessary in this world. When you encounter a situation or when you enter a room (this is how the brain works) your nervous system picks up on a few cues about the room, and that makes you realize which program you should be running. It?s an efficiency mechanism.

You go home to your children, spouse, and parents. Those are very familiar situations. The sets of programs you have for those situations are very limited. The triggers abound and the program runs automatically. You don?t need to decide what to do; you already know. When you see a face, you recognize it from just a few points within the face. So when we are in our office and we see that face with certain similarities, we already know who it belongs to. Your nervous system (to save time and energy) does not bother with picking up the signals every single time. It just picks up a few, runs the program, and puts the familiar face in it. If you put all your attention into that face, the program is not running; you are receiving the data and it is completely new.

So imagine that someone were to tell you that when you are born you easily stare into the face of God. To see that face now would require way too much attention. So instead, you run your program called ?the world,? ?reality,? ?the Tonal.? This program allows you to act without being rendered incapable of acting due to the awe, the influx of infinite information.

Dr. John Lilly created this loop called ?Cogitate.? What he did was just record one word. The word was cogitate, which means something similar to think, to apply that machinery of cognition. He just recorded it once, then repeated that same word by copying the recording. You have twenty minutes of Dr. John Lilly saying ?cogitate.? If you listen to it, after a couple of minutes you begin to hear other words, at first similar to it, such as meditate, but then completely different words and phrases. This programming that we have in our visual fields, in our language, allows us to do two things. We have it in the language too?we speak in set phrases, such as ?Have a nice day,? without having to put any attention into them. We do it like this because it allows us to function in this world with low energy, low attention, asleep.

We have managed as a society to create a world where the masses can operate without a user?completely asleep. Have you ever dreamed in your car and not known where you?ve been. We do it over and over and over again. Have you had entire conversations and then not been able to know what you said or what was said to you. You might even say sincerely, you know. But you can?t repeat more than a fragment.

Like the plight of the single man in college after a long lecture in the classroom, going to his room and opening the refrigerator. He sees the same thing over and over. So in boredom he goes to bed. Whereas, the married one goes to the bed and sees the same thing over and over, then goes to the refrigerator. I?m not sexist; I treat everyone this way.

But we have those programs. And we can go on with life, we can talk about politics, even philosophy, and be completely asleep. By asleep, I mean we let the programs run, we go on autopilot. The blessing is that if we did not have that feature, you wouldn?t be able to drive and tune out, not even for a single moment, because your arms would go all over. Most of our lives we are on autopilot.

When you practice something over and over, you are acquiring that program for that situation. And the programming allows you to be more or less efficient, but the curse is it doesn?t always allow you to register the new information. You?ve probably experienced driving, and all of a sudden you see the traffic that is no longer moving and you were still moving. You could have seen it before, but you didn?t. And do you notice the lag between the recognition and the slamming of the brakes? Tell me if this is not true. You see it, and there is a tiny slight moment where you have to decide whether to slam the brakes or hit the car in front of you. That tiny moment is a moment of enlightenment because you have to decide which program to use. Why that moment of decision?

That can be a scary thing. If you prolong that state of being awake for five minutes, you would be incapable of moving or talking. You would feel as if you are behind the scenes watching. You know what is happening but you can?t do anything about it, like in a state of hypnosis. You were following program number one, something woke you up (?Okay, let?s go to brake-slamming program?), and you run into a different set of programs, and time feels like it slows down, and your life flashes before your eyes.

We are constantly in the world of the Tonal. The Tonal or whatever is in front of you is the face of God. But instead of looking and having a vision of the real world, you?re imposing your notions, your programming, and your own reality onto it.

Koyote the Blind, January 2008

Koyote the Blind is an Hablador (Master Storyteller) in the 9th century Toltec tradition. He is also the one responsible for bringing the Aka Dua to the public in the Western Hemisphere. The Tequihua Foundation has attempted to assist him in that aim.

The Tonal is excerpted from the book Teachings of a Toltec Survivor by Koyote the Blind. The book is a record of the magically created performance of Koyote during the twelve weeks between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice in 2007.

www.tequihuafoundation.org