Is Freedom Not a Thing in Your Religion?

When we speak of “the toltec way” there are several specific principles, methods and philosophies that comprise the way.  For instance, there’s the Five Life Objectives: Emancipation, Equilibrium, Experience, Death and Ancestors. Emancipation of Consciousness promotes clarity through the training of the senses and detachment from the machinations of life.

Consciousness refers to our awareness, our thinking and our decision-making ability, (unlike conscience, which refers to morality). From the moment we emerge on the planet the consciousness we are born with is inundated with input and information about how people live, survive, love, fight and all those things we human beings do. Problem is at a certain time in life we discover that we really didn’t have a choice in many of the beliefs and principles we live by. We had to take the ones given us and didn’t realize we had choices. It’s nothing new, this programming; it’s been happening on the Earth a long time. Maybe that’s why our ancestors promote the emancipation of consciousness, so we make our own decisions about what we believe and how we live.

Detaching from the effects of that programming is not an easy task, but doable, nonetheless. Things can get sticky with those who love us. We can all say the thoughts of others don’t affect us but if you’re living, eating and breathing around those thoughts, there’s no way you can escape at least some of their influence. So how does one escape those thoughts and the resulting programming?

Making decisions and living beliefs one chooses is where we start. The practice, and its fine tuning, becomes ingrained through learning, thought, movement, discipline and meditation. Therein is the” training of the senses and detachment from the machinations of life.”

A key item in the list, by the way, involves finding your own divinity, the divinity within. When you do this deeply, dogma becomes refreshingly irrelevant, because your Experience, life objective number 3, has the final word in how you live your life. As you ponder these things, please remember to

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