You are being pro­vid­ed with a book chap­ter by chap­ter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chap­ter. After read­ing the chap­ter, 1. short­en the chap­ter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any impor­tant nouns in the chap­ter. 3. Do not trans­late the orig­i­nal lan­guage. 4. Keep the same style as the orig­i­nal chap­ter, keep it con­sis­tent through­out the chap­ter. Your reply must com­ply with all four require­ments, or it’s invalid.
I will pro­vide the chap­ter now.

INTRODUCTION

The Smokey Mir­ror

THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THERE WAS A HUMAN just like
you and me who lived near a city sur­round­ed by moun­tains. The
human was study­ing to become a med­i­cine man, to learn the
knowl­edge of his ances­tors, but he didn’t com­plete­ly agree with
every­thing he was learn­ing. In his heart, he felt there must be
some­thing more.
One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own
body sleep­ing. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon.
The sky was clear, and he could see mil­lions of stars. Then
some­thing hap­pened inside of him that trans­formed his life for­ev­er.
He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice
say, “I am made of light; I am made of stars.”
He looked at the stars again, and he real­ized that it’s not the stars
that cre­ate light, but rather light that cre­ates the stars. “Every­thing is
made of light,” he said, “and the space in-between isn’t emp­ty.” And
he knew that every­thing that exists is one liv­ing being, and that light
is the mes­sen­ger of life, because it is alive and con­tains all
infor­ma­tion.
Then he real­ized that although he was made of stars, he was not
those stars. “I am in-between the stars,” he thought. So he called the
stars the tonal and the light between the stars the nagual, and he
knew that what cre­at­ed the har­mo­ny and space between the two is
Life or Intent. With­out Life, the tonal and the nagual could not exist.
Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Cre­ator who
cre­ates every­thing.
This is what he dis­cov­ered: Every­thing in exis­tence is a
man­i­fes­ta­tion of the one liv­ing being we call God. Every­thing is God.
And he came to the con­clu­sion that human per­cep­tion is mere­ly light
per­ceiv­ing light. He also saw that mat­ter is a mir­ror — every­thing is a
mir­ror that reflects light and cre­ates images of that light — and the
world of illu­sion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn’t allow us
to see what we real­ly are. “The real us is pure love, pure light,” he
said.
This real­iza­tion changed his life. Once he knew what he real­ly
was, he looked around at oth­er humans and the rest of nature, and
he was amazed at what he saw. He saw him­self in every­thing — in
every human, in every ani­mal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain,
in the clouds, in the earth. And he saw that Life mixed the tonal and
the nagual in dif­fer­ent ways to cre­ate bil­lions of man­i­fes­ta­tions of
Life.
In those few moments he com­pre­hend­ed every­thing. He was very
excit­ed, and his heart was filled with peace. He could hard­ly wait to
tell his peo­ple what he had dis­cov­ered. But there were no words to
explain it. He tried to tell the oth­ers, but they could not under­stand.
They could see that he had changed, that some­thing beau­ti­ful was
radi­at­ing from his eyes and his voice. They noticed that he no longer
had judg­ment about any­thing or any­one. He was no longer like
any­one else.
He could under­stand every­one very well, but no one could
under­stand him. They believed that he was an incar­na­tion of God,
and he smiled when he heard this and he said, “It is true. I am God.
But you are also God. We are the same, you and I. We are images
of light. We are God.” But still the peo­ple didn’t under­stand him.
He had dis­cov­ered that he was a mir­ror for the rest of the peo­ple,
a mir­ror in which he could see him­self. “Every­one is a mir­ror,” he
said. He saw him­self in every­one, but nobody saw him as
them­selves. And he real­ized that every­one was dream­ing, but
with­out aware­ness, with­out know­ing what they real­ly are. They
couldn’t see him as them­selves because there was a wall of fog or
smoke between the mir­rors. And that wall of fog was made by the
inter­pre­ta­tion of images of light — the Dream of humans.
Then he knew that he would soon for­get all that he had learned.
He want­ed to remem­ber all the visions he had had, so he decid­ed to
call him­self the Smokey Mir­ror so that he would always know that
mat­ter is a mir­ror and the smoke in-between is what keeps us from
know­ing what we are. He said, “I am the Smokey Mir­ror, because I
am look­ing at myself in all of you, but we don’t rec­og­nize each oth­er
because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, and
the mir­ror is you, the dream­er.”