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Toltec Dream Matrix
Introduction
from the forthcoming book: The Toltec Dream Secret: the Life and Teachings of Weremay Kachora

Kachora and Ken Small

"My name is Weremay Kachora. I was born near Rio Yaqui in Umbadero Canyon more than eighty years ago. My father, Javali, was what we in the Yaqui world call a 'man of knowledge.' Some use the name Nagual. What I prefer is 'doctor del campo' -- a doctor or healer who uses the spirit of nature with the power of plants to heal others. The beginning of my story comes from around 1500 AD when the Spaniards came with their foreign language, different customs and new Christian religion. The Conquistadors were very aggressive and enslaved the Yaqui. Everything natural in Yaqui culture began to become distorted, for at that time the Yaqui were very natural and had no outer defense against these new ways and strange energies. As a result, our ancient wisdom that had existed openly before conquest was carefully hidden to be preserved for the future. From the 1500's until now the sacred wisdom has been kept secret in Yaqui culture within seven secret clans, in order to preserve it. This is true throughout Meso-America. Before the Conquistadors it [the original culture] was more free and open and from then until now it was obscured... though never lost or broken. Now, this dark cycle is ending and a receptive spirit is dawning in the world. It is time again for this ancient sacred knowledge to emerge in order to help lead people back to a more spiritual and natural way of life."
     Thus Kachora spoke the introductory words that he wished to have at the beginning of this first volume on Meso-American sacred knowledge: The Toltec Dream Matrix. He feels a deep responsibility to preserve the integrity of the Yaqui way of life and to pass on some presentation of it to a world now more receptive. For this reason he shared with a small group of apprentices, myself included, some of this sacred knowledge and experience. After an introductory period of testing and trial, he would teach and speak to us openly and clearly about his tradition -- though only when approached with a clear intent. It was during this time that he requested I assist him in making available a written form of his Yaqui wisdom.
     Kachora traces his Yaqui "priest lineage" through his father, Javali (don Esteban Gonzalez Vasquez, b. ?-d. 1925), who raised him and taught him and was a custodian of the sacred knowledge from Rio Yaqui. A leader and spiritual teacher, Javali's life span of more than a century overlapped the time period of the great "warrior-shamans" Geronimo (Gokhlayeh being his Apache name), Cochise and others. Javali was among the Yaquis who collaborated with Geronimo, applying insights from his skill in ancient Yaqui divination for Geronimo's warrior strategies. It would be Kachora's grandfather, Nana, who with Geronimo would make the great sacrifice and surrender to General Cook, in order to save their remaining people hidden in the Yaqui canyons. Later, around 1910, Kachora's father would be captured with thousands of Yaquis and forcibly removed to Oaxacan slave labor camps by the Mexican government. He would then escape to Chiapas and meet his Lakandon wife-to-be and return to Rio Yaqui.
     Maria de la Luz Sandoval-Ramirez, Kachora's mother, was born near San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas in the 1870s. "Soledad," as she was called, died about 1940. Her parents were Lakandon and of priest lineage. It was from his mother that Kachora studied and absorbed what he refers to as "Asian" or "Mongolian" teachings of energy cultivation, special concentration, movement, and meditation practice. He would absorb fluency from his parents in two Yaqui dialects and two Lakandon dialects and another "Asian" language from his mother. He would also master writing the unique ideographic language of her lineage and symbolic pictorial figures of his father.
     This presentation of Kachora's tradition, then, is as unique as his lineage, which weaves into one whole the secret wisdom from both the Yaqui and Lakandon peoples of Mexico. It is a wisdom rooted within the special and hidden priest lineages that have been from ancient times through this century integral with their cultural, spiritual life and knowledge.
     In many ways Kachora has taken on a new mode or persona to suit conditions around him. When I first met him, he appeared to be a simple Indian campesino knowing a little about herbs, even pretending illiteracy if the situation required. At another time he appeared as a worldly businessman balancing his accounts and offering blandishments to the bill collector. The brilliant spiritual master of his tradition was for most of us who knew him elusive, even invisible. Gradually this would change and his inner wisdom would appear, though quickly disappearing in an instant depending on who entered his arena.
     After spending quite some time with him, one day he said matter-of-factly: "You know, you have not met the real Kachora yet, but perhaps one day you will."
     Indeed, over many years I have watched his masterful ability to reflect back to his students and friends around him the dynamics of the realities within each person's life and offer his guidance to move them through their illusory bands and obstructions toward seeing. Occasionally, the reaction of the student to the inner dynamics of this Toltec path would be to flee his self-created whirlwind with great haste -- only to realize that there is no escape! This would arouse in Kachora a smile, combined with his pointed Yaqui humor: "Pinchi Aguila!" or "Pinchi Juan," all the while laughing at his students' human folly. These episodes, at times especially intense with his gringo students, never deterred Kachora's insistence to "keep on keeping on," pointing the way and walking the path to the Infinite.
     I have come to view him as a timeless reflector of the ageless wisdom; a witness and experienced one, an "adept" of the deepest Meso-American Toltec mysteries. He has touched and even become imbued with the gift of the Infinite and the gift of seeing the sublime in the seeming ordinary and present moment. Yet his strong view has never been self-inflated, so that he would often humbly say: "Our minds are the same."
     He has often emphasized that his knowledge comes directly from his Yaqui and Lakandon family sources, though it is clear that he has also grasped a great deal about all of the cultures and languages of Meso-America. His view is: "Ancient Mexico had one spirit and one religion expressed in many different languages, cultures and customs. Gucumatz, Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl, Plumed Serpent, or what I call the 'analogo interno' are all names for the same Spiritual Reality. There was only one unified Toltec teaching in ancient times."
     He had been around -- on foot, on the ground, or riding his donkey in the early years -- and likes to tell stories of when he would walk from Rio Yaqui in Sonora to Yuma and then to Los Angeles -- the first time when he was twelve years old in 1926. Today he laughs at the changes and complexity in crossing the border, when at that time a marked border did not even exist between the U.S. and Mexico. He has lived in Sonora, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi, as well as in Arizona and Colorado.
     My apprenticeship with Kachora had two primary aspects: external information about history, herbs, metaphysics, energy and spiritual matters, including symbology and cosmology; and second: the internal experiential basis of all these things, which was his primary teaching modality and focus. Kachora always followed the ancient Chinese dictum on teaching: he presented only two or three legs of the table or aspects of a given teaching, with the student needing to grasp through his own experience and validation the actual table shape and, in time, the whole picture. He was endlessly patient, with a careful balance of sobriety and insightful humor. Everything, including the smallest life detail, was always viewed from the inside out, the spirit dynamics first, then, once the spirit had been grasped, the informational aspects.
     Unlike other teachings that had become available to the general public on the Yaqui, Kachora's style is direct. When questioned, Kachora characterized these other teachings as "Like the curves of a rattlesnake they hide as much as they reveal and cause confusion and this is dangerous." When pressed about other lineages within the Yaqui/Toltec world he was raised in and asked about his teacher "Julian," he was initially reticent and evasive. Kachora did not appear to like talking of him, though would refer to him respectfully as "mysterious," "hidden" and "of great power."
     Initially he would say only that the lineage from Julian Huite (1830s-1940), who was Yaqui and the teacher of Juan Alonso Matus (the "Don Juan" of the Carlos Castaneda volumes, 1895-1971), was: "focused on the levels and nature of dreaming and the training of the subtle senses," as well as on "the intent to move energy to be a sorcerer (brujo)." "Julian taught concentrations, occult science, the acquiring of psychic and mental powers -- I never saw Julian healing anyone," Kachora points out. Years later he would reveal more of Julian Huite's mystery and lineage.
     Kachora made it clear from the beginning that he considered these techniques as diversions from the central path of spiritual liberation. For him attaining levels of dream awareness and the acquiring of subtle powers and sensorial concentrations, however interesting, are deviations from the central path.
     This volume then is an attempt to describe the goal of liberation and the healing of others as the motivating force that carries the student beyond any self-indulgent distractions for power. The motivational healing force is the energy that carries one to pass the barrier of what Kachora calls the "umbral'" into the heart of Chamahua or the "analogo interno," the secret heart of the Infinite.
     The convergent Yaqui/Lakandon lineages of Kachora's parents each contain core aspects of insight and practice. The elements are, on the Yaqui side: the master of intent and the "point of convergence;" and on his mother's side: the priestess of the consciousness, energy generation and concentration practices. The Yaqui Javali's mastery of awakening and empowering the "punto de encaje" (point of convergence) is the quintessential awareness-practice, in Yaqui tradition, the accomplishment of which brings ultimate freedom. The practices from his mother's tradition developed the qualities and energies giving the student the necessary internal energetic "fuel" and capacity to ignite and open the "punto de encaje."
     Kachora further describes three fundamental points of emphases on the path: first, the knowledge of plants for healing, through both practical and visionary experience, as well as via abstract and theoretical comprehension. Second, the correlation of cosmic and mundane forces. And third, the heart and primary focus of the lineage: the motivation and actualization of achieving the flight to the Infinite, the realm of Chamahua, the Universal Spirit. Throughout all these phases there is the emphasis on healing: "One does not need to be a plant expert to enter the Infinite, but it is important to obtain this complementary healing knowledge." Moreover, "one who does not heal others cannot enter the Infinite."
     In Kachora's lineage, then, the fundamental motivation to heal parallels the Bodhisattva vow "to save all sentient beings" of Mahayana Buddhism. This motivational power is the inner force in the Yaqui wisdom teaching that transports one to the Infinite. These three points of experience are wound into one tight ball of effort, of Zen-like force and intention. It is that force of intent that the great Chinese Ch'an Master Pai Chang described as: "Bringing to focus that unity of intent that breaks atoms into universes." Kachora describes his as a most difficult path, composed of three parts: a cleansing of body and mind, physically and energetically; the illumination of knowledge; and the experience of union with the Infinite. The path calls for steadfast firmness of effort and intention to the very end.
     In my apprenticeship process he would give out small hints or pieces of information, or a general principle followed by some concrete experience reflecting a deeper reality. This was a completely non-linear process with the specifics and details gradually filling in over time. It was a constant engagement of drawing out from what was already within; he would feed me and the other apprentices an idea or experience gradually, "poco poquito," testing our ability to know directly and experientially. It was always up to my own effort and ability to figure out and engage with the experiential level. He never saw himself as expertly articulate, and it was not infrequent that he would pause in his speaking to try to come up with a better Spanish equivalent to his Yaqui/Lakandon concept. He had only learned Spanish as a teenager and its linear nature was often awkward for him. His thought process seemed to be a complex interlinking of symbols and images, rather than linear or rational abstractions.
     Kachora views Yaqui sacred tradition as unique and special, yet always stresses its universal message and path. Constantly curious about similarities to Yaqui ideas from other parts of the world, Kachora especially finds links to Buddhism, ancient Tibetan Bon, the natural energies of Taoism, and aspects of Hinduism. When presented with some of these ideas for comparison, he was always excited and pleased with parallels to the Yaqui way, frequently saying that his ancestors originated from Asia and came to Mexico in huge 300 foot dragon headed boats as, in his mother's words, during "the reign of a hundred kings ago."
     The basic outlines of Yaqui sacred knowledge described in this volume are revealed within the actual context in which I experienced and received them. The personal names, places and time sequences have at times been changed to make a more cohesive presentation, yet all that is recounted actually happened and all the teachings presented come from Kachora's lineage. Given that the nature of this book is the exploration and transformation of consciousness, the normally subtle and obscure achieve a meaning and importance our ordinary awareness usually remains blind to in everyday life.
     Under Kachora's guidance, it became clear to me as I progressed that the Yaqui path of inner spiritual cultivation has preserved some very special methods and techniques. These methods are combined with a world-view very much needed today, with its emphasis on nature, the plant and animal kingdoms, and their closely interlinked relationship with human beings. His teachings on the sacred nature of the plants are, for Kachora, central to both the evolution and the continuance of human life on this planet, not only physically, but spiritually. As we tumble into deeper and deeper ecological disaster all over the planet, these teachings become crucial. In light of this, Kachora requests that this book be dedicated with the deepest gratitude to what are to him inseparable realities: his father, the Yaqui Nagual, Javali, and his Lakandon mother, Soladad, from whom this wisdom is transmitted, as well as to nature and the plant kingdom, the great benefactors of all life on this planet.
     "Nature is the guide to the Infinite, to Chamahua. Nature is the 'good spirit' that guides us and shows us the harmony and balance to follow in order to enter the path to the Infinite. Follow this path and all life prospers and you will attain the ultimate Realization."

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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