Three thousand years ago, there was a human being, like you and me, who lived near a city surrounded by mountains. The human being studied to become a shaman, to learn the wisdom of his ancestors, but he did not completely agree with everything he learned. In his heart, he felt that there was something more.
One day, while sleeping in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on a new moon night. The sky was clear, and he saw thousands of stars. Then something happened inside him that changed his life forever. He looked at his hands, felt his body and heard his own voice saying, “I am made of light; I am made of stars.”
He looked again at the stars and realized that it was not the stars that created the light, but rather the light that created the stars. “Everything is made of light,” he added, “and the space in between is not empty.” And he knew everything that existed in a living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information.
Then he understood that although he was made of stars, he was not those stars. “I am what exists among 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 Intention. 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 that exists is a manifestation of the being we call God. Everything is God. And he concluded that human perception is just light that perceives 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 smoke that does not allow us to see who we really are. “The real us is pure love, pure Light,” he said.
This realization changed his life. Once he knew who he really was, he looked around at the other humans and the rest of nature and was surprised at what he saw. He saw himself in everything – in every human being, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, on the earth. And he saw that Life mixed the tonal and the nagual in different ways to create billions of manifestations of Life.
In that few moments he understood everything. He became very excited, and his heart was filled with peace. He couldn’t wait to tell his people what he’d discovered. But there were no words to explain. He tried to talk to them, but they couldn’t understand. They realized that the man had changed, that something beautiful radiated from his eyes and voice. They noticed that he no longer judged things and people. He no longer like the others.
He understood others very well, but no one could understand him. They believed him to be the living incarnation of God, and he smiled when he heard this, and told them, “It is true. I am God. But you are also God. We are the same, you and me. We are images of light. We are God.” Even so, people did not understand him.
He had discovered that he was a mirror for other people, a mirror in which he could observe himself. “Everyone is a mirror,” he said. He saw himself in everyone, but no one saw him as themselves. Then he understood that they were all dreaming, but without consciousness, not knowing what they really were. They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog between the mirrors. And that wall was built by the interpretation of images of light – the Dream of human beings.
Then he realized that he would soon forget everything he had learned. He wanted to remember all the visions he had seen; therefore, he decided to call himself the Misty Mirror, so that he would always know that matter is a mirror and that the mist in the middle is what keeps us from knowing who we are. He said, “I am the Misty Mirror, because I see myself in all of you, but we do not recognize each other because of the fog between us. That fog is the dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer.”
Source: Dom Miguel Ruiz