GUILLERMO MARÍN
Oaxaca, spring 1996.
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The global Western culture dominance began in the 16th century after the invasion suffered by America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Through their brutal warrior machinery, Europeans, guided by Anglo-Saxons, dominated all the peoples of the world, including those which emerged from the "mother cultures".
Thus Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Mexico, and the Andean zone were subjugated, not only by inhumane exploitation of their peoples and fierce destruction of their natural resources, and perhaps the most important destruction were the attempts to destroy their ancient philosophical thoughts, their religions, their ways of life; and from their ruins construct the omnipotent Western culture. After the passage of the invading armies, arrived the institutions, laws and the European authorities, and with them a new conception of the world and life was imposed, of well-being and progress, the sacred and divine. Colonial societies around the world, despised any value of the invaded cultures and overly exalted an assumed European superiority.
In these 500 years of Western hegemony, the wisdom and knowledge of many peoples had to hide and survive clandestine, others have been diluted and are believed to be almost extinct. The Western view of the world from material values and consumerism over spiritual, the dehumanized cult to science and technology, the looting of the planet and the disposal of human being in favor of industrial, commercial and consumerist societies, have led to the bankruptcy of the Western culture and are endangering life on the planet.
However, the human spirit is not dead and its wisdom live sheltered in many ancient peoples of the world. This is the case of the Toltecáyotl, knowledge that engendered the miracle of the civilization of the ancient Mexico, with its apogee between 200 BCE and 850 CE.
In fact Nahuatl, Maya, Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, among many others, are part of a single civilization, from the earlier Olmec times of the preclassical period to the classical and postclassical periods, and its evolution line has reached our days avoiding its historic death. But all of them in their diversity, maintain a cohesive philosophical structure and which has allowed them to survive the ups and downs and denial, to which they have been submitted these last five hundred colonialism years.
The Toltecáyotl or Toltequity, as referred to by don Juan Matus, represents an immeasurable wealth of knowledge and practices, which not only have to do with food, medicine, sciences and the moral and ethical standards of the human groups that practice them consciously or unconsciously[1]; but for the very sophisticated and complex skills that have to do with energy and the spiritual strength of human beings and entities around them.
The "don Juan teachings", today more than ever, come to uncover an unknown world until now for the non-indigenous society of Mexico. Ever since the uprising
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- ↑ Indigenous communities maintain this wisdom their cultural practices of their daily community life.
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