FINDING LOST CIVILIZATIONS This

any building that housed a museum. We passed a small parkand then decided to stop the car so we could walk aroundthe neighborhood. As we got out of the car a Mexican fellowstepped out of his house and we asked him if he knew wherethe museum was. He replied in English and pointed to thepark and said, “It’s over there.” He then went to the gated parkand opened the iron grill doors, imploring us to follow him.I am always amazed at how our way of thinking through oursocialization process funnels our thoughts and perceptionsto a certain viewpoint, which can be quite different when weare away from our social group. I associated the word “museum”with a building, and that’s what we were looking for.In their teachings, the Toltec Indians of Mexico used to referto this as “The Dream of the World.” And that much of howwe thought and behaved as adults was programmed into usfrom the moment we were born by the group we were borninto. Don Miguel Ruiz a modern Toltec teacher, emphasizesthat we should be impeccable in our word, not take thingspersonally, do the best we can, and not make assumptions,as they are often wrong. As a traveler one of the pleasures Ienjoy is the ability to step out of my own world and try toview it from a different perspective.Anyway, as the English-speaking local fellow led us intothe park or museum, he pointed out various large bouldersthat had petroglyphs carved into the stone. I asked him if theboulders were native to the small park and he replied thatthey had been transported to the site from the nearby mountainslocated to the east. He mentioned there were many suchboulders locally. He also mentioned that he had found manypottery fragments, which he wanted to show us. He then ledus into his house and showed us a small and shallow redclay bowl that was about six inches across. Painted along theoutside rim were various flowers and plants. He mentionedthat he had found the bowl intact in a nearby field. I examinedthe bowl and could tell it was very similar to the fragmentof the bowl I had found in Guayabitos.10