Some Totlec thoughts and the parable of the lost boy

YESTERDAY WHEN I arrived from Cebu, mother handed to me a book given by my cousin from California. Under normal conditions, having come from travel, I would just sit on the low chair and watch TV. Instead I flipped open the book’s avocado green cross cover with expressionistic flowers growing in each plot, delved and found myself meditating on the pages. This is the first time I read “something” about “Toltec” thoughts and “wisdom”, and how pleasantly surprised I was to note how the spiritual insights arrived at by inhabitants of that ancient civilization in Mexico can be so applicable to contemporary Filipino settings.

Take this for instance: “…it is important for you to master you own dream; that is why the Toltecs become dream masters. Your life is a manifestation of your dream; it is an art. And you can change your life anytime if you aren’t enjoying the dream. Dream masters create a masterpiece of life; they control the dream by making choices. Everything has consequences and a dream master is aware of the consequences”…”the freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves. But if we look at our lives we will see that most of the time we do things just to please others, just to be accepted by others…the first step toward personal freedom is awareness. We need to be aware that we are not free in order to be free. We need to be aware of what the problem is in order to solve the problem.”

There’s a story—a parable—I want to tell of a rich boy who loved going to a mountain (one that looked like Magsanga). He was a privileged boy with life befitting the comforts of a king: red, blue and yellow cars, air conditioned rooms and a sense of sure security. For who else would inherit the business empire that took his parents their entire life to build. But unfathomably and paradoxically the boy took no interest in the

business, its perks and pampered seats. As David Larrabee said in “Sabrina” when asked why he appeared to care little of their family fortune ran by his elder brother,” why should I when he’s there”. Instead the boy loved to sit on mountain tops or roam outdoors, his arm skin brushing against blades of grass. He loves to see the twirling sun set. A “fool on a hill” for some, but for me he it is who “sees the world spinning round”. But his parents, not getting any younger by the day, will have none of this and pressed and egged him to start taking charge, for does not logic tell who else will? The boy gave in, got married, and stopped going to the mountain. That place for him has become a memory, a glass framed fixture standing on display cabinet in a corridor blanketed by dust and gloom. He never did get to figure out that which his heart in the beginning pointed would be his own life’s original pathway.

If that parable were a play of Aeschelus in olden Greece, the “chorus” will probably appear and sing wearing masks of long faces and sadness saying: “why so sad and blue and uncertain when I have seen you easily climb the swaying palms? You can tell the speed of the wind, height of the tallest hill. You can flicker your full lamplight to say hello to southern friends at the other curve of the bay. You fit into the blue wind, as the bird and clay earth like the color of your shirt and sun burnt hands. Groping for answers that day I want to stop the twirling sun. How I wish to let you know. Someone’s watching those lean and confident lizard steps. But would you never know. I’m using binoculars.”

(June 4-10, 2001)