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Excerpt
A DREAM JOURNEY
This book will take you on a dream journey into your imagination. Your destination is heaven on earth and your guide will be Miguel Angel Ruiz.
Miguel is a nagual.
Nagual is a word passed down from ancient times through the Aztec language, Nahuatl. The word nagual is making its way into English, particularly in discussions of shamanism. What is a nagual?
According to Toltec tradition everything that exists is one living being, which manifests itself by creating everything that we can perceive and everything that we cannot perceive. This living being is the only one who really exists. All else, including ourselves, is an emanation of this great and wonderful being.
This being controls our planet by supervising the energy of the sun, and the sun also is an emanation of the one being, whereas all the planets orbiting the sun are emanations of the sun. All life on the Planet Earth is an emanation of the sun in an interaction with the Mother Earth.
To understand the emanations of the one living being, the Toltecs divided everything into the nagual and the tonal.
The nagual is everything that exists that we cannot perceive. We could call it the unknowable and the unknown. The tonal is everything that we can perceive with our common sense.
The tonal and the nagual can only exist because of intent. Intent is that connection or that force which makes possible all transference of energy between the nagual and the tonal. Without intent, neither the nagual nor the tonal would exist. There would literally be nothing in existence at all. Intent is life. It is eternal transformation and eternal interaction. Intent is what we call God. Intent is life by itself; it is God and it is Spirit.
In terms of our modern science, everything that exists in the world is energy. Light is energy and everything, at its root, is light. Energy has billions of manifestations, millions of different vibrations. The nagual is all the energy in the stars and between the stars that we cannot perceive. This is "el nagual." The kind of energy that we can perceive, and prove that it exists, we call "el tonal."
The solar system is a living being with its own metabolism, with its own nagual and tonal. The tonal is the sun, with all of the planets, moons, comets, meteorites and satellites...everything that we can perceive with our eye and the instruments that give increased power to our eye. The nagual is the energy that comes from these planets and moons, including the energy that emanates from the earth.
Planet Earth is also a living being with its own nagual and tonal. It, too, has its own metabolism. Like the human body which has many organs that work together to maintain a perfect equilibrium, the earth also has organs. Among these organs is the human organ composed of all human beings together. As an organ, human beings also have their own nagual and tonal. Emotions are energy that we cannot perceive, but we call them tonal because we experience them in our senses. The tonal in humans is the energy we know and also the energy that it is possible to know. The nagual is the energy that we cannot know with our reason. In the Toltec tradition, we call God "the Eagle," which means the spirit. All human beings are the Eagle. All human beings are the nagual, the tonal and also intent, whether they are living or dead. When we refer to a person as a nagual, we mean that the person has a characteristic energy which creates a direct connection between the nagual and the tonal. The nagual can split emotions from actions. The nagual is born with a strong will and is not paralyzed by fear. A human being who is not born as a nagual is often paralyzed by fear. Nonetheless, in theory, anyone can become a nagual by intent. Some seers can see a person's characteristic mind energy in the energetic field that surrounds the human body. If the person is a nagual, the nagual energy field around the body has a shape like a double egg. The form is that of a mandorla, a slightly pointed oval.
A nagual is a person who has the ability to teach or guide others to the spirit by convincing them that inside of each person is a powerful force linking one to God. This is the force of pure intent. Usually, the nagual is the one who guides others to find who they really are, to help them find their own spirit, their own freedom, their own joy, happiness and love.
Miguel Angel Ruiz was born a nagual. From the moment of his birth, he had a precocious awareness of spirit. He was an incipient Master of Intent. From a young age, he received training from his family and also through visions.
Miguel is dedicated to spreading his spiritual knowledge as broadly as possible. For a decade, he has drawn upon his visions to impart to his students a vast amount of wisdom that has been hidden for centuries. They learn from his lectures, workshops and journeys.
For those who may never meet Miguel, the material in this book has the power to replace fear with joy.
We are all inculcated with fear. Miguel says fear is the normal result of our domestication in childhood. Fear is the root of the reality we usually perceive around us. Fear is the source of disease, of war, and of alienation from the joy that is our birthright.
The greatest fear, subsuming all other fears, is fear of loss or death. The path Miguel follows is straight into the heart of our fear of death. His wisdom is derived from a vision of the Toltec spiritual center in Teotihuacán where ancient masters discovered a process for ridding ourselves of fear. Miguel has journeyed to Teotihuacán with his students each month for years. While there, he has led them along the Avenue of the Dead. He has directed ceremonies at various stages of the path and guided his apprentices to confront their fears and to release them. From this process, they awake to a new view of reality in which the world is one of justice and happiness.
You do not have to visit Teotihuacán in order to benefit from Miguel's wisdom. It is enough that you lend your imagination to the inner journey of your own spirit.
Excerpted from Beyond Fear by Mary C. Nelson, Don Miguel Ruiz. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Carroll Nelson and Miguel Angel Ruiz. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
