Flight of the Warrior Tim Harris 18x25, Oil on Canvas
In the summer of 2001 I discovered "The Four Agreements" by don Miguel Ruiz, a nagual in the Eagle Knight lineage of the Toltec mystery school. This began a one year excursion on the Toltec path. Having been an avid reader of Carlos Castaneda in college I resonated with the message of don Miguel and soon read his other books, and attended a lecture in the Seattle area where I met Heather Ash. Heather is a student of don Miguel, also a nagual, and the founder of the Toltec Center of Creative Intent in Berkeley. Wanting to learn more, I became a Jaguar Apprentice in the SpiritWeavers program designed by Heather. During these first months of my Toltec studies and apprenticeship I worked on a series of paintings that came to me as I walked this new path.
The paintings are divided into two groups - those that are about domestication and life before the apprenticeship and those dealing with the transformation that came about as a result of the apprenticeship. The first group is mostly dark, showing the Parasite, the Judge, the Victim, and the walls that held me in. The second group is about breaking free, flying, and the tools of transformation.
The above piece came about after we had completed our Power Sticks. I felt it was a symbol of the freedom I was discovering. The landscape below is one of my favorite places in the world, Rocky Ford Spring Creek in Eastern Washington where I spend time camping, fly fishing, and journaling. It seemed an appropriate place where my Spirit would take flight.
Don Miguel teaches that when we are children we learn from our parents, teachers, and society how to behave. We accept the beliefs of society as fact and take them on as agreements. This process is called the domestication of humans. During this domestication process we develop what don Miguel calls The Parasite. The parasite "... is a living being that exists in your belief system, and lives by eating your faith, your intent, your happiness."
The Parasite has two major components – the Judge and the Victim. The Judge is the part of oneself that is constantly judging everything, especially oneself. The Judge more often than not, finds one guilty and gives a harsh sentence. The other component is the Victim. The Victim is the part that says “poor me, look at how bad I have it.” The Judge and the Victim work together to make one’s life a hell that is hard to escape. They use all the old agreements that we learned in childhood to uphold their views of the world and keep an individual walled off from the rest of humanity.
The first group of paintings is about the domestication process and its walls. The first three are self-portraits portraying the Parasite, the Judge, and the Victim. The last two are about the walls that held me in and the cracks that began to form in them, allowing for change.
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Me and My Parasite (Self-Portrait) Don Miguel states that the Parasite is "..a living being that exists in your belief system, and lives by eating your faith, your intent, your happiness. " The Parasite has two components - the Judge and the Victim. I see the Parasite as a giant tick, the most common parasite that I have to deal with while wandering around in Eastern Washington. |
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The Victim (Self-Portrait) The Victim is the part of oneself that is always crying "Poor Me", it is one piece of the Parasite that forms from the domestication process. I picture my victim as being curled up and surrounded by brick walls in all directions. |
Me & My Judge (Self-Portrait) The Judge is the other piece of the Parasite, it is the part of oneself that is constantly judging and finding oneself guilty. My Judge used to like to scream at me telling me how I'd done everything wrong and that I was guilty for everything that went wrong. This was the first piece in the series that I completed. |
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First Glimpse Outside the Wall This painting came about because of the brick wall metaphor I'd found with the Victim. I realized at some point that I began to see a glimmer of light within the walls that I'd formed around myself. |
A Way Out This painting was a continuation of the previous piece, the crack in the wall is now an opening and the only way out is to take wing and fly. |
The domestication process can be broken by three masteries in the Toltec tradition – The Mastery of Awareness, the Mastery of Transformation, and the Mastery of Intent. The first six months of the apprenticeship program is geared toward the first mastery, that of Awareness. Using the mitote book, monthly mitote ceremony, the Tarot cards, and other tools we begin to look closely at the agreements that we have made and begin, slowly, to let go of some of them. We also take on the new Four Agreements:
Through these new agreements and the loosening of the old ones, transformation can begin to take place and freedom gained.
The second group of paintings is about freedom and the tools that we used to begin to reach freedom.
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Return of the Warrior This was the first Power Stick piece I completed. The act of creating the Power Sticks was done in meditation and the image of the cloth and string spiraling around the stick just stuck with me. This painting is the stick coming apart instead of together, going back to the Sun. |
Flight of Quetzalcoatl The Power Stick is a symbol of the Feathered Serpent of the Toltecs, Quetzalcoatl. This image came about after Flight of the Warrior using Quetzalccoatl directly over the pyramids at Teo. |
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Power Tools This still life is of the tools we used during the apprenticeship period - the Mitote candle, the Power Stick, the Mitote Book, the Arrow, the Tarot cards, and the Mask. |
Mitote Vision This painting came about from a hypnogogic image I had during my first Mitote ceremony. It was of a low alter under a big tree on a field of grass. |
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Tree Grounding The Tree Grounding meditation had good visual imagry for me whenever I did it. This image is what I "see" when doing the grounding, with the enegry of the Earth coming up as orangish fire, the energy of the Sky coming down as blue, and the two of them mixing at the Heart Chakra and radiating out into the world. |
The Fool (Self-Portrait) The Fool is the beginning and the goal really, it seemed appropriate. This self-portrait includes my dog, Isan, as the puppy following the fool.
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