The Golden Flower: Toltec Mastery of Dreaming and Astral Voyaging

by Koyote the Blind

Overview

A unique book on the art of dreaming, astral projection, and voyaging through the higher planes, presented by a Toltec shaman and Western magician. This is the Yoga of Dreaming. It is a distillation of the deepest teachings and art of lucid dreaming, delivered in clear and practical, yet poetic, prose. A delight to read, and filled with practical gems throughout. The exercises included in the text will introduce the novice to lucid dreaming practices—or enable the more advanced reader to experiment new approaches to Dreaming as a spiritual practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895566133
Publisher:	Gateways Books & Tapes
Publication date:	07/13/2018
Series:	Consciousness Classics
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Koyote the Blind runs Xicoco, an esoteric school of the Toltecs, where he trains students in magick, shamanism, mysticism, and yoga. He has created seminars on the Yoga of Dreaming, meditation, astral voyaging, shadow walking, magick, the power of attention, alchemy, and tantra. He lives in Riverside, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Part One In the Garden of Dreams Grows the Flower of Experience

Fearless

I started working in the Dreaming when I was very young. I was a little four-year-old boy in El Salvador. I was having disturbing recurring dreams where I died. In the dream, I would fly; and the flying brought tremendous pleasure, but a self-defeating thought would come each time. It was the thought that I would fall. Was that thought there because I felt the tensions and overheard the talks all around me of the social injustices and military repression that seemed to be boiling to the point of inevitable war? Was it the lingering memories of my birth, when I found myself flying free in the higher aethers in between incarnations, only to see myself making a wrong move of my attention that would make me fall and get trapped in an organic matrix of electrical energy called the human nervous system? It could be a collaboration of factors, but at the time, I was simply feeling overwhelmed by these dreams. The initial flying felt like freedom and power, but the thought of falling would come, and as it is wont in the Dreaming, a thought is a directional command. Each time, I would fall, and the fall came with dread. I would then wake up before hitting the floor, sweating and trembling, my heart palpitating.

My senses became very open at that time. I started seeing the invisible world around me and, without anyone to really guide me through that, I was filled with panic and dread. I started fearing death, imagining my body decomposing and being devoured by worms. The darkness would arrive with the sounds of the tropical night, and I would lie in bed with my senses open and my nervous system lit. I started seeing spirits and creatures invisible to others. It only increased my fear at night, seeing the elemental spirits surrounding me. In my childish imagination, I thought I saw witches around my bed, whispering incantations and changing their faces into any horrific vision that my imagination would invoke.

At some point, this recurring dream started to happen. I would walk this path that led away from my home and a witch would come out of a neighbor's house. She was crazy, screaming at the top of her lungs, laughing; and her laughter seemed to penetrate my skull. I would start running around an almond tree in front of her house — just running around in circles. She would keep following me with her crazy laughter, until she would catch me and stab me with her knife.

Every time this would happen, I would awaken in panic. Until one day, I found myself in a dream under the shade of that almond tree. A young man was there, sitting by the tree, and I next to him. He asked me why I was afraid of dying. We spoke at length in this dream. After a while, he told me that there was no place called death, but only sleeping, dreaming, and waking. "You are only scared because you don't know how to wake up," he said. "I'll teach you how to wake up." With that promise, he closed his eyes, grabbed his eyelids with his delicate fingers, and opened them. I followed his example; and grabbing my eyelids, I opened my eyes and woke up. I felt excited, thinking I had just learned a big secret. I knew how to wake up from any dream!

I immediately went back to sleep, and I found myself walking up the street from my house; and when I passed by the almond tree, I could sense the presence behind the door — the dreaded presence of the witch. Like always, she dashed out with her long face with six eyes and her hideous laughter. In panic, I started running around the tree, but this time, I had a secret. I grabbed my eyelids and opened them, finding myself in my bed, not sweating nor trembling. I was happy and elated. Enthusiastically, I went back into the dream. I found myself again in front of the almond tree. The witch didn't come out. My mind calm, I found out that it was I who called her out with my fearful anticipation. With my mind quiet, I knew she was behind the dark doorway, but held her there with my silence. I decided then to fly. I flew. Higher and higher, I went. I held the thought of falling back with my silence, and the fear of falling stayed in the shadows of my subconscious, like the witch behind the doorway by the almond tree. I flew and landed.

This event started a bold series of experiments in the Dreaming. I shape-shifted, grew tall like a giant to explore vast lands and cross oceans, bigger still, to see galaxies dancing in my hands. I became eagle and whale, cat and shadow. I went to deserts and jungles. I talked to masters and discarnate beings. Over the decades, I exercised the limits of my imagination, knowing that I could roam the entirety of creation without fear. I had a secret: I could wake up at will.

At one point, however, I realized that the limits of my experiences were still confined by the fear of dying. I decided to experience this passage in the dream, encouraged by the words of that young man who assured there was no death, just the passage between dreams, the sleep, and the waking.

One day, I became lucid in a dream and, fully aware that I was dreaming, I decided to fly. I flew, and this time I allowed the thought of falling to bubble up from the shadows of my unconscious. I fell. I held in check the desire to open my eyes and wake up. I felt the impact on the floor, and died. The superstitions of many had told me that if you die in a dream, you die for real. I didn't die a physical death. Instead, I found myself in a field of light without forms, vast and musical. It was an indescribable experience, and my child's mind was unable to fully explain it or classify it.

Encouraged by the success of my experiments in the Dreaming, I decided to revisit my fear laden limits. One day, I found myself standing by the almond tree. I called the witch out of the shadows, and I ran around the tree to follow protocol. This time, I ran without fear. I decided to let it happen. I allowed her to come out. I allowed her to stab me; and I allowed myself to die; and when I died, her laughter started ringing off like tiny bells in the distance; and somehow I knew, I remembered, that I had been there already. Then, I woke up inside another space, another dream; and in this dream, I was sitting by a tree and a tiger came and devoured me. I allowed him to devour me. I felt his teeth entering my flesh and tearing me apart, and I died. I went dream after dream dying in many ways.

I woke up knowing that there was something in this dream world that needed to be explored or understood. And then, with great enthusiasm, I started going into the Dreaming, exploring things, flying, becoming as big as a galaxy, becoming small like an ant — smaller than that, like a molecule ... smaller than an atom. I would travel and move, change my face, change my shape and so on. I learned much, and the guides in the Dreaming started guiding me, telling me where to go, what to do, and how to experience different things.

I encourage you earnestly to be fearless in your experimentation. Create the habit of going beyond the limits of your fear. The key is to know that nothing can really happen to you, no matter what happens to your dream avatar. Nothing and no one can harm you. You cannot truly harm anyone in the dream. Even if attacked, hurt, and killed, you will wake up unharmed, alive, and intact. If you offend someone you love, kill someone, or burn your house, you will wake up and no one will feel offended, no one will have been killed by you, and your house will still be standing. There is no guilt in a dream; feel free, therefore, to do as you will.

Of course, one could say that this admonition only works if you are lucid, knowing that you are dreaming. This is only partly true. On the one hand, even if we become lucid during a dream, we might still be ridden by fear and guilt, and that will stop us from going beyond the limits of our habitual dreaming. On the other hand, even if we don't know we are dreaming, we benefit from being able to think beyond the limits of our fears. Therefore, training ourselves to go beyond our fears is something useful in itself.

Developing the ability to become lucid is of tremendous help for all work in the Dreaming. The next chapter will provide clear and useful training for developing lucidity and for remembering your dreams. However, you do not need to wait until you can become lucid in your dreams to do these experiments. In fact, it is very important to develop the habit of experimenting, regardless of whether you are lucid or not. Practice outside your dreams and you will train your unconscious to practice any time.

* * *

This is the trick: use your imagination to perform these experiments. You do not need to be sleeping to perform them. Relax your body and clear your mind by using any relaxation or meditation technique you know. Lie down in a calm and comfortable place where you can be free of interruptions and distractions. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a safe and pleasant place. Now, imagine a dream where you experience whatever you want to experience. Face your fears knowing you can wake up any time. Here, you can:

• Experience many deaths and many rebirths.

• Grow as tall as you want, as tall as the Galaxy. Grow until the entire universe is just a particle inside you and, therefore, you are nowhere in creation.

• Grow as small as an ant, or a molecule, or an atom. Keep going until subatomic particles seem as big as worlds.

• Become a member of the opposite gender. Experience this new body.

• Become different animals; smell, see, hear, and move as they do. Feel their hunger and hunt.

• Be the wind, fire, a storm.

• Be an inanimate object. Feel what that is like.

• Experience walking through walls, swimming in the asphalt, and being invisible.

• Become various beings of non-human forms.

• Talk to people you know, and people you wish you knew. Hold entire conversations with them.

* * *

The only limits to what we can be or what we can experience are in our own imagination. We tend to stop ourselves from new experiences, more out of habit than out of fear. There is a habit of the mind to think of ourselves as limited and constricted to our physical form. Because we think we are our body, we tend to dream as if we had the exact same body and the same gender as when we are awake. That is, we automatically create our dream avatar as a replica of our physical form. Go beyond this tendency when you practice, and practice often!

This practice will transfer to your dreaming and, soon, you will find yourself experiencing these events in your dreams. It is very important, and I can't stress this point enough, to have a dream journal. Get a journal dedicated to your dreaming and astral projection experiences. When you do the exercises above, always write down the experiences and sensations you had. We will talk more about the importance of the journal in the next chapter.

One most invaluable technique to be learned and applied in any dream, and in any environment whatsoever, is the ability to remember oneself as the dreamer, so that one can distinguish between the one who dreams and the avatar that has been created in that dream. The effort necessary to remember oneself as a dreamer is the kind of effort that ties a string of memory between one dream and the other. The untrained attention immerses you into the simulation that you are creating in that moment, and when you disengage it to move into another simulation, nothing is threaded from the previous simulation to the new simulation. Nothing is threaded from the world you were in just a moment ago and the world where you find yourself at this very moment. And so you go, from dream to dream, from lifetime to lifetime, from avatar to avatar, from environment to environment, always thinking that this is where you have always been; always thinking that this is who you are; always thinking that this is what happens to you. When you acquire the habit of remembering yourself as the dreamer, you come to know when you are making a switch; you come to know that you have, just now, been somewhere else; and remember, not only where you were, but also the transition.

The technique for remembering yourself is the most simple technique — just a constant mantra, from the simple "I am that I am," to the technique of invoking your presence into the present, to the technique of asking, "Is this a dream?"

A secondary technique which opens many doorways is the technique of challenging the limits of that environment. Whenever you find yourself in a dream, try to bring the experience to its maximum potential. If you can fly in the dream, fly, and go up and up, and see how far you can go. Move up, up, up, up. Don't stop. Keep going. Avoid the temptation of drifting back into sleep, and put all your force into going up. Keep going up until you have exhausted all your force, until you find yourself unable to go up anymore, and then try to go up some more. You'll be surprised by where you wake up, by where you find yourself after such an effort. Alter the size of your body. Become bigger and bigger and bigger, until the planet cannot hold you, and keep growing until the solar system becomes just a spec of light in the center of your heart. Keep growing until the galaxy is the size of your body, and keep growing until all the stars and all galactic clusters have become so small that the entire universe seems to be a vanishing point in the distance, remote and silent within your own body. In another dream, become small. See everything around you doubling in size — the chairs, the people, the walls, everything growing twice its size; and then, twice its size again, so you become smaller and smaller, until you are able to perceive the giant insects; and then, smaller than that, until you perceive the vibrations of the molecules all around you; and smaller than that, where the universe is just a chaotic collection of shimmering points; and then, smaller than that, until every atom becomes as vast and impossible as the universe itself. Change your form; become the opposite gender in your dream; live a dream as the opposite of who you are. Do good. Do evil. Experience pain and suffering. Experience everything you are afraid of. Be devoured by a tiger. Let the jaguar tear off your face. Be buried alive. Drown. Be burned at the stake. Notice your flesh decaying, your bones being gnawed, your body rotting and dissolving, floating in a river. Die a thousand deaths in your dreams. Expose yourself to that. Learn to not awaken when you are about to die. Learn to die, and see that you don't always awaken in your ordinary existence, that sometimes you awaken after death in a higher dimension, in an impossibly alien world. Become an animal, a crow, a cat, a bee. Become an inanimate object in your dreams. Become no one — just a silent observer of the dream. Become the other people that you see in the dream. Put yourself in their perspective, and dream the dream they are dreaming. Walk through walls. Become a cloud. Be the wind that moves the green leaves in the forest. Experiment in your dreams to the limits of your imagination. Do not believe that your only possible experience is a human experience, and do not believe that the only possible human experience is the experience of your habitual form.

In every dream, you have the entirety of the human experience at your disposal. You can be anyone and anything that your subconscious mind can conceive. You will find in these experiments tremendous power, freedom, and the range of emotions and moods that will give you the experience of millions of lifetimes in one. Practice. Be creative. Be fearless in your dreams. If you are fearless in your dreams, you will find yourself applying the same fearlessness in your life. If you are able to lose your form in your dreams, you will find yourself beyond your ordinary form in your waking life. Eventually, this will lead to that moment in which you are no longer just experiencing the simulation of the reality created within your brain; but you are able to, actually, perceive outside of the simulation, into the actual world; because you will not be perceiving with the senses anymore, but with another body that has become possible through the unification of your waking avatar with your dream avatar. You'll be able to perceive, then, the objective world and, from there, live a life so difficult to explain, yet so magnificent that any other portion of your ordinary life will pale in comparison — for every experience that you had within this simulation of reality will be duller and more muted than the direct, raw, perception of the light bombarding all the senses of your body in this very moment.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Golden Flower"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Koyote the Blind (Ricardo Flores).
Excerpted by permission of Gateways Books & Tapes / I.D.H.H.B., Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

A Voyager Has Come This Way by Gerald Porter vi

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword xv

Preface xvii

Introduction xxiii

Part I In the Garden of Dreams 1

Grows the Flower of Experience

Fearless 3

On Lucidity and Apperception 13

The Four Regions of the Dreaming 19

Waking Dreaming 23

Dreaming's Gate 27

The Key of Dreams 33

Part II And the Flower Unfolds 39

Petals of Light

Across the Borders of the Dreaming 41

The Yoga of Dreaming 47

The Organic Blueprint of a Soul 55

The Etheric Body 65

How to Construct the Astral Body 79

Advanced Shamanic Techniques 85

Part III And in the Philosopher's Garden 99

Lives the Scent of a Golden Flower

The Beast 101

Dream Is a Dealing with Light 105

The Other Self 111

The Golden Flower 117

The Going 121

The Three Keys 125

Appendix: A Kabbalistic Analysis of the Dreaming 129

About the Author 143

Contact Information 144