Header Image
    Cover of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)
    Self-help

    The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)

    by

    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.”

    Quotes

    No quotes found.

    No faqs found.

    Note