Life Creates: The Toltec Path—Enneagram Point 8

This article is part of a series called The Illuminating Enneagram.

A man ascends the steps of a giant stone pyramid on a bright sunny day in central Mexico. His eyes are fixed on the top. His arms move fluidly by his sides, but he’s propelled upward by a resolved will, as if his belly were magnetized to the pyramid’s peak. Truth is the only thing on his mind. All his attention is concentrated in a dynamic combination of his single-minded desire for truth and the movement of his body climbing up, step by step. It’s a meditation: his spiritual aspiration is embodied in the physical act of ascending the pyramid.

This pyramid is the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, the place that used to be a spiritual university for the Toltecs. Here they would practice awareness and live in community. Teotihuacan is a powerful site of ancient ruins, however, to call it “ruins” makes it seem dead when in fact it has a living presence, similar to Mt. Arunachala in India or the Mount of Beatitudes. Teo, as it’s affectionately called, is the place on Earth where the spirit of the Toltec teachings can be most easily connected to. That spirit is one of conscious awareness, discipline, happiness, love, and harmony with life.

Many people are familiar with the Toltec teachings through the bestselling book The Four Agreements. The author, Miguel Ruiz, was born into a family that has kept the wisdom of the Toltecs alive. Before the time of the Spanish conquest, Toltec society was alive and well and their way of life was practiced out in the open. However, the invasion of the conquistadors forced the knowledge of the Toltecs to be hidden away for safekeeping. After hundreds of years of obscurity, in 1968, Carlos Castaneda brought the Toltec path to the public eye through his books featuring the master teacher, Don Juan. About thirty years later, Miguel published The Four Agreements, offering teachings to people directly from his lineage. It is thought that Castaneda’s books are compelling because they are good “fiction,” or that The Four Agreements is popular because it’s excellent common sense, but really, humanity is attracted to these teachings because they are reminding us of wisdom we are yearning to remember. The Toltecs spent their whole lives steeping in this wisdom. Their transmission carries great power.

Since individuals and the traditions they carry forward are distinct, it’s possible that the energy of a lineage holder is congruent with a different Enneagram point than the tradition itself. In this case, while the Toltec teachings are overall congruent with Enneagram Point 8, the energy of the warrior, Miguel Ruiz has Type 4 energy and brings in the perspective of the artist. The way I sense it is that the larger energy — the energy of the tradition — is being translated through a person with his own unique makeup. And so, while in the larger energy we find the themes of power, aliveness, will, warriorship, etc., when brought forward by Miguel, themes such as beauty, love, gratitude, and romance come to the fore. Creatorship is common to both points, 8 and 4.

People sometimes get the misconception that a shamanic path, such as the Toltec, is all about plant medicines and altered states of consciousness. Plant medicines were, traditionally, an aspect of Toltec spirituality. Carlos Castaneda was initiated into Don Juan’s lineage through the use of power plants. However, my understanding is that while the Toltecs used plant medicines ceremonially to gather awareness about the cosmos and consciousness, such ceremonies were special rituals intended to deepen a practice that was, as Miguel says, a “way of life.” The Toltecs would take the visions they received and the new awareness they gathered during ceremony and build on that in their spiritual practice. They would see, for example, how universal spirit wanted to become embodied in humans, and turn that into a strong focus on bringing spirit or consciousness into the physical body. They would accomplish this in many ways: through days and nights of meditation, fasts, solo retreats in the desert, and practices such as “hunting” or “stalking” and cleaning their consciousness—to rid themselves of the miasmic “mind of suffering.”

Don Juan, the sorcerer who initiates Castaneda, embodies the 8, challenger energy of the Toltec path. Besides constantly surprising Carlos with new adventures, challenges and trials — similar to how George Gurdjieff, a teacher of the Enneagram and Type 8 person, would shock his students without warning — Don Juan repeatedly pushes his apprentice into expanded states of consciousness (disorienting or destabilizing though they may be!). Pushing is a Type 8 approach of challenging a person to go further in consciousness and break through their thresholds. Barbara Emerys and other apprentices of Miguel have spoken of the way he’d be able to give them a consciousness boost through “pure force of will.” The will plays an important role in the Toltec path, just as it’s essential to the way 8’s move through the world. The will is used to refrain from indulgence in the temptations of the parasitic mind (the practice of “not-doing”); to augment chosen feeling states; and to manifest dreams by taking action. Making the will very strong, then, has great importance for the Toltecs.

Don Juan and his partner, Don Genaro, are also seen laughing hysterically and uncontrollably many times in Castaneda’s books. In contrast to the normal human state of dullness and grayness, they play life like a game, intensely alive. These warriors are great examples of the viscerally embodied, wildly alive 8 energy of the Toltec. In Toltec practice, the nagual (master) learns to be completely alive by opening himself to feel everything: all of his body, his heart center, the nature and animals around him, other people, the life force within things — everything. It makes perfect sense that feeling alive is the way of the Toltec, since they hold Life itself in such high regard. In the way Miguel uses it, the word “Life” points to the “force of the … Creator who creates everything.” It’s a force, a power, also called “Intent.” While animating force is Life’s primary meaning, the feeling of aliveness itself, as well as Life’s manifestation as nature, are associated meanings. Nature constantly regenerates itself in cycles of creation and destruction. From the four seasons to the metamorphosis of the butterfly, and beyond, patterns of death and rebirth unfold ubiquitously. Observing this, the Toltecs gleaned Life’s teaching of being non-attached to her creations and ever invoking a state of renewal. They created a mirror version of nature’s pattern of self-renewal in their society: they are said to have wiped the slate clean of their adopted ways of doing and thinking every 52 years, and began again from scratch. They observed this wisdom of letting go of the past and embracing a new version of self also in the snake’s self-transformative process of shedding its skin; hence snakeheads are carved into the temples at Teotihuacan, near the plaza of Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent).

On the Enneagram, Mother Earth is connected with the belly center: it’s not only our center of personal power but our roots as well. (The head center opens up to the heavens, and the heart bridges heaven and earth.) Shamanic traditions are rooted in the love and wisdom of Earth, a living being herself, and so they have a strong connection with the belly. At the end of Tales of Power, Don Juan reveals that the greatest love of a Toltec warrior is the Earth; the Earth is his beloved and “bestows upon him inconceivable gifts.” The Toltec has a symbiotic relationship with the Earth in which he is nourished, sustained and supported by her, but he also becomes the guardian, the protector of her and her inhabitants. It’s no wonder that the Toltecs absorb so much insight from spirit animals (not only snakes but the jaguar, the lizard, the owl, etc.). All the animals are messengers of Earth’s intelligence. In this beloved community the shaman lives in complete connection with a vibrant web of beings, at one with nature. While one dimension of the Toltec wisdom faces up towards the sun — the masculine principle, the freedom and transcendence of consciousness — on the whole this spirituality is deeply rooted in the earth. The Toltec path is a very grounded path: a path of aliveness, instinct, strength of will and personal power.

Don Juan calls the way of the Toltec “the warrior’s way.” Although the name often given to Enneagram Type 8 is The Challenger, another viable name for this personality is The Warrior. Point 8, as I explained in my last article, is the aspect of our spiritual nature having the most to do with power, strength, and aliveness or vitality. The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr said in a lecture series on the Enneagram, “If the 4 is an identification with feminine energy, even in a man, the 8 is the identification with masculine energy, even in a woman.” Eight is the most masculine (yang) point on the Enneagram; the place of sheer force of will, the place of the fist. Although this robust masculine energy is more pervasive in Castaneda’s series, it also forms a foundation for Miguel’s teachings. He says in The Four Agreements, for example, “you must have a very strong will, a very strong will to keep these agreements,” and, “The Four Agreements were created … to help you break the limiting agreements, gain more personal power, and become stronger.” The first agreement — “be impeccable with your word” — calls back to an 8 theme that we saw in the last 8 teaching: integrity, and the discipline of using one’s word cleanly, pristinely. However, whereas in the last teaching we looked at, integrity had to do with alignment of action with word, in Miguel’s teaching impeccability means not using the word against oneself. It means not judging, not making oneself the victim, not misusing the word with others. Here, the work goes in the direction of cleaning and healing the diseased state of the human mind. The work of Miguel’s teaching is to end suffering.

Students of The Four Agreements may know the reason old agreements are hard to break is that they’ve been stored with our faith. “Faith” is not used with the conventional meaning, although it’s related. Faith is our power to create reality. It’s essentially the force of life flowing through us — to take a thought, an idea, a dream, and make it real, by imbuing it with our faith. This is a profound thing to contemplate. But it’s important to get that, Enneagramatically, faith is linked to the belly, the power center — less so the head center. We need the head center’s conscious awareness of our beliefs/agreements in order to have a chance at transforming them, but the process of withdrawing power/faith out of them is the effort of the warrior. The warrior’s way demands vigilance, discipline, determination, commitment, steadfastness, will and strength. It’s a transformational process in which beliefs are starved of the faith-energy that was used to create them in the first place. Not being fed with energy leads to the decay and eventual death of those beliefs. All of that recovered energy can be put, instead, into a new creation in harmony with heart desires.

I once asked a nagual from Miguel’s lineage how to end the mind’s entrancement that keeps us living as if under a spell, rather than in the present moment. His answer: break the belief in what the mind is saying as being real or true. Take back your faith. Once the mind has been disbelieved, it loses its power to pull you into a trance. The thought comes up, but you see it’s trying to pull you into a story, a dream, and you don’t fall prey to its seduction. So you can see how, in this path, the spiritual warrior challenges the parasitic mind, he challenges his beliefs, and this is why Miguel calls it a “war.” It’s a war waged for one’s freedom from suffering and the opportunity to choose to live in beautiful emotions — love, gratitude, self-respect. Now the 8 energy of the Toltec is plain to see.

The eagle is another spirit animal for the Toltec, a physical mirror for the freedom of flying high in the skies of consciousness. The Toltec appreciate the eagle’s symbolism not only for its emanation of great power, as in its wingspan and talons, but because freedom is one of their highest values. The Toltecs’ 8 energy blends into a wing point at Point 7. Enneagram teacher Russ Hudson points out that “The most fundamental quality and need for Point 7 … is freedom” (Nine Gateways to Presence). This quality of freedom feels like vast spaciousness, no boundaries and no walls, as if there were an inner sky corresponding to the outer one. The openness and unlimitedness of the inner sky gets obscured, however, when the contents of the limited mind are identified with. The journey of a Toltec warrior transpires through the wrestling free of their attachment to their mind and the ways it tries to hook them into suffering, and in doing so, regaining their freedom. That’s one way the head center factors into this path—as an emphasis on inner freedom—but the aspect of conscious awakeness that’s associated with Point 6 is also of crucial importance. It underlies the practice of vigilance needed to be a “hunter” or “stalker” of one’s mind, with the goal of being awake to the ways the mind tries to lure one into suffering, as opposed to asleep in daydreaming identification with the mind. The Toltec saw the owl as an embodiment of the constant vigilance the spiritual warrior required — the bird who keeps watch in the night.

In The Toltec Art of Life and Death, his most autobiographical writing, Miguel allows people to see his amorous side—Miguel the lover. While he loves many women, his tenderness and empathy also become assets in transforming his relationship with his thinking mind (the “voice of knowledge”). He says, “I used the talent that came most naturally to me—my talent for romance.” This is one of the clues to his personality type, Type 4, The Romantic. The Toltec path can seem harsh, demanding, and even terrifying in Castaneda’s writings — a world of mind-bending states of consciousness and predatory awarenesses the warrior must learn to combat. Miguel, however, brings a warmth and a bigger dimension of affection that has touched many people’s hearts. He chooses to live as a messenger of love. For the Toltec there are three masteries: the mastery of awareness, the mastery of transformation, and the mastery of intent. But Miguel calls this last “The Mastery of Love,” because when we get free from the old stories and old dreams that we fed unconsciously with our faith, and we get more control over our attention, then we can master using our power to live in love.

This is one of the places where I think bringing the lens of the Enneagram to spiritual teaching is really illuminating. If we look at the Toltec teachings as they exist in Castaneda’s work, there’s not very much emphasis on emotions and heart-aspects. But these elements take on great importance in Miguel’s teachings. It’s the same tradition of Toltec wisdom, but now the wisdom is relayed through a messenger whose personality is in the heart center. The Point 8 aspects are still very present. It’s still a warrior’s path, requiring a strong will and initiating a war against the inner parasite. But now other, heart centered aspects that were all but absent in Castaneda become very significant: refraining from creating emotional poison; healing the emotional body; the heart as a “magical kitchen” of love; and making life into an “ongoing romance.”

Years ago, when I first experienced Miguel’s lineage through another nagual, the practice I learned was creating gratitude. It was an extraordinary revelation for me that the quality of my emotional experience could change dramatically, from a flat, neutral tone to feeling deeply content and thankful for life, at will, simply through putting attention in a particular place and willfully expanding a feeling. Looking back, although that practice came to me through another person, I see that it was a gift from Miguel’s lineage. It’s possible to put yourself in blissful, beautiful states of love, happiness, and gratitude — a state of heaven — through a combination of directing your attention, understanding that you create emotions with your faith, and engaging your will. Eight energy synergizes with Four energy: the 8’s strong will and personal power is put in service of creating emotional experiences that are a healing balm for our hearts, yummy nectar for our soul. The love grows until it not only includes other people but embraces all of humanity. Former students of Miguel say that his greatest teaching was his unconditional love.

In Castaneda’s books Don Juan says the term “Toltec” means “man of knowledge.” But Miguel attributes another meaning: “artist of the spirit.” “In the Toltec tradition, every human is an artist, and the supreme art is the expression of the beauty of our spirit” (Voice of Knowledge). Coincidentally, one of the names for Enneagram Type 4 is The Artist. Miguel teaches that all the things we say, feel, and do are expressions of our art, whether we do them consciously or not. The Four Agreements and his other books are expressions of his art. They are faithful to his lineage and the Toltec tradition but also imbued with his personal energy and unique perspective. Both of the Enneagram Points in play here, 8 and 4, are creative. Whereas the 8’s willpower is often channeled into business and building things, the 4’s creativity is more likely to be expressed in storytelling, dance, sculpture, painting, etc. Miguel’s creatorship draws on both: pure life force and will channeled in the direction of making life a masterpiece of art — a canvas painted with the colors of generosity, compassion, selfless service, laughter, tenderness, inspiration and brave, unreasonable love.

At night in Teotihuacan the moonlight shines down on the Pyramid of the Moon. A multitude of stars are clearly visible from the Avenue of the Dead. Human beings tend to look up at the stars and think they are such small beings in a universe so much bigger than they are. But the Toltecs realized that the stars are within us. Teotihuacan means the place where “Man becomes God:” humans awaken to the truth that all of life is One, all consciousness is One. The man ascending the pyramid reaches the top and sees that all things are himself. He sees himself in everything — in every human, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, in the earth. The truth he was looking for is the truth that he is. The enlightenment he searched for is the light he is made of. At dawn the sun breaks over the horizon, announcing a new day, its beautiful rays reflected in his eyes.