Aaron Asphar

I love eccentric writing and Don Miguel Ruiz’s writing is eccentric for me: a contemporary writer from the Toltec tradition, seeking to preserve this ancient wisdom in a similar way to modern writers of the Buddhist or Hindu traditions. We rarely get this kind of penetrating criticism in mainstream Western literature – it’s all coming from Eastern inspired or in this case, other ancient traditions – the criticisms are from beneath socially, just as they are culturally, as we respond emotionally and aesthetically to the hegemony, not ‘politically’ in the traditional sense of the term. Ruiz’s writing is another example of this ‘perennial wisdom’ Huxley talks of (he called it perennial philosophy but it is pre-philosophical; it’s wordless, eternal wisdom) – I say eternal because we all agree emotionally, and always have. For example, such wisdom occurs in all human history, but moreover, we all know what freedom is – and we all know it from childhood, not because we were free necessarily, or happy, but because we recall what it was like to be completely unmediated by the strictures of social codes, language and so forth: our humanity couldn’t help but bust through – even Oliver Twist asked for more. Just a childhood glimpse of freedom is enough; all of this perennial wisdom, all these practices of emancipation, whether in the alienated West (Nietzsche, Tzara, punk bands like Bikini Kill or Sex Pistols), or the East (for example in Hindu or Buddhist cultures) or in the various nature loving Native American tribes, praxis has sought to restore this pre-alienated instinctual, emotional elasticity, to reach that state of Nirvana prior to the wild swings of negativity and pleasure into pure, embodied being, a bliss state of joy or in the case of punk bands, visceral catharsis – in any case, the collapse of alienated past and future into the intensity of the immediate. To do so there is a negation of that which mediates – social history, or in the case of ancient cultures the effects of social production. Anyway, I write too much so just citing passages here. NB, re the ancient culture, this is from Wikipedia:

“The Toltec culture is an archaeological Mesoamerican culture that dominated a state centred in Tula, Hidalgo in the early post-classic period of Mesoamerican chronology (ca 800-1000 CE). The later Aztec culture saw the Toltecs as their intellectual and cultural predecessors and described Toltec culture emanating from Tollan (Nahuatl for Tula) as the epitome of civilization.”

Here are some pictures:

These quotes come from two essays – The Human Mind and Communication, and a book, The Four Agreements (I shouldn’t really say eccentric – ‘other’, that from my limited experience)…

The Human Mind – Perception and the Mind

Everything you perceive is contained in your mind. Sight creates images that are reproduced in our mind. We don’t see something in front of us we actually see a reproduction in our mind. We don’t hear sounds happening in the distance, vibrations travel through the air, hit your ear drum, travel down nerve pathways and a “sound” is reproduced in our mind. Touch, smell, taste all are perceived and experienced in the same way. Keeping this truth in your daily awareness will completely change your experience of life.

If everything you are perceiving is inside your mind, where are you? Your mind is a bubble, “you” are a point of perception inside the bubble. Everything you perceive is all around you, not the outside world but the inside walls of the bubble. You could say that you never interact with the outside world but with the inside of your own bubble. This is a literal description of how our perception evolved and the reason there is so much confusion and suffering and we call it the “human condition”.

So what we have described here is that there are two separate realities that exist at the same time. The outside “real physical world” and the inside our mind reproduction of the real world where our awareness and point of perception are located. When there is a conflict in our perception and understanding between what is happening in the real outside world and what we mistakenly perceive is happening by our inside bubble there is confusion, misunderstandings, conflict and emotional pain. The outside world is always the truth of the way things really are, the world inside of our bubble is the one that can be in error or distorted.

How does this disconnect between the outside reality and what we perceive inside of our bubble happen? Our mind takes in perceptions of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste and reproduces them extremely accurately within the bubble. This highly accurate reproduction allows us to move around, drive a car, have conversations, smell and taste all with a very high degree of truth and congruence with the what is actually there on the outside, but there are two things that happen inside of our mind that are not happening in the physical outside world, they are our thoughts or “thinking” and our emotions. When our emotion and thoughts are mixed with the perception of our other senses they cause a distorted perception and interpretation inside of our bubble than what is actually happening in the outside world. When this distortion happens it is so seamless and “real” that we do not even notice that it is not what happened in the outside world.

Communication

At birth we have the ability to create the channels from the brain to the soul. When that is complete, the channels from your brain to other people’s brains develop. The channels from the outside net already exist when we are born, and they help to create all the channels in the inside net. Because we perceive the outside net, we are trained by it and the outside net puts its program on the inside net. It’s a dream we call the Dream of the Planet.

The outside net hooks your channels through your attention and affects your whole inside net. The net outside is a living being, and the net inside is a living being also…Whoever controls the attention controls the will. When we are born, the outside net transfers its program to the inside net by hooking our attention. The inside net becomes a replica that differs according to the soul we have. These differences give us different personalities, reactions to things and makes us different even though the outside dream (or the net outside) is the same. The outside net sets up the teaching for the inside net by making it easy to be manipulated by the outside. Hooking the attention from the outside is how we become the puppets of the outside net. To become a warrior we must recover control of our will. The outside net pulls our will and manipulates us. We rebel as children when the game first begins. We rebel again as teenagers. And we are rebelling again now.

Many people just give up. When we have the awareness we rebel and become warriors. We declare a war against what we call the “parasite” (which is the program the outside net put into the inside net). All the efforts we make are just to recover the control of our will. The result is to control the will from the inside and no longer from the outside. The outside is hell – full of hate and fear. The outside net eats fear. The net gets the power to survive from the little nets that are programmed inside of every human. It puts the seeds in the minds, creates fear and then eats the fear. The net is alive because humans give it life. Once you recover your free will, you can control your attention from inside. Knowing that you can control your attention from inside is why I am telling you this. To help you become stronger from inside. My whole purpose is for your freedom.

The seeds that I put in your mind are intended to help you recover your freedom and gain the awareness of what is really happening with you and the dream. The seeds I send to you are for you to increase your love and to build your trust in yourself. So you will know that you always have a choice. A seed that can help you to stop judging and feeling victimized. Seeds that if they grow, will become peach, happiness, joy and love inside of you.

Don Miguel Ruiz – The Four Agreements

Children are domesticated the same way that we domesticate a dog, a cat, or any other animal. In order to teach a dog we punish the dog and we give it rewards. We train our children whom we love so much the same way that we train any domesticated animal: with a system of punishment and reward.

We are told, “You’re a good boy,” or “You’re a good girl,” when we do what Mom and Dad want us to do. When we don’t, we are “a bad girl” or “a bad boy.” When we went against the rules we were punished; when we went along with the rules we got a reward. We were punished many times a day, and we were also rewarded many times a day. Soon we became afraid of being punished and also afraid of not receiving the reward. The reward is the attention that we got from our parents or from other people like siblings, teachers, and friends. We soon develop a need to hook other people’s attention in order to get the reward.

The reward feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward. With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else. We try to please Mom and Dad, we try to please the teachers at school, we try to please the church, and so we start acting. We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough.

Eventually we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of Mamma’s beliefs, Daddy’s beliefs, society’s beliefs, and religion’s beliefs. All our normal tendencies are lost in the process of domestication. And when we are old enough for our mind to understand, we learn the word no. The adults say, “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” We rebel and say, “No!” We rebel because we are defending our freedom. We want to be ourself, but we are very little, and the adults are big and strong. After a certain time we are afraid because we know that every time we do something wrong we are going to be punished. The domestication is so strong that at a certain point in our life we no longer need anyone to domesticate us…We are an auto-domesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward.

There is something in our minds that judges everybody and everything, including the weather, the dog, the cat — everything. The inner Judge uses what is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do, everything we think and don’t think, and everything we feel and don’t feel. Everything lives under the tyranny of this Judge. Every time we do something that goes against the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we should be ashamed. This happens many times a day, day after day, for all the years of our lives. There is another part of us that receives the judgments, and this part is called the Victim. The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame. It is the part of us that says, “Poor me, I’m not good enough, I’m not intelligent enough, I’m not attractive enough, I’m not worthy of love, poor me.” The big Judge agrees and says, “Yes, you are not good enough.” And this is all based on a belief system that we never chose to believe.

Whatever goes against the Book of Law will make you feel a funny sensation in your solar plexus, and it’s called fear. Breaking the rules in the Book of Law opens your emotional wounds, and your reaction is to create emotional poison. Because everything that is in the Book of Law has to be true, anything that challenges what you believe is going to make you feel unsafe. Even if the Book of Law is wrong, it makes you feel safe. That is why we need a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs. Because even if we know we didn’t choose all these beliefs, it is also true that we agreed to all of them. The agreement is so strong that even if we understand the concept of it not being true, we feel the blame, the guilt, and the shame that occur if we go against these rules.

How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is thousands of times. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don’t need to do it again. But every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again, and again, and again. If we have a wife or husband he or she also reminds us of the mistake, so we can judge ourselves again, punish ourselves again, and find ourselves guilty again.

How many times do we make our spouse, our children, or our parents pay for the same mistake? Every time we remember the mistake, we blame them again and send them all the emotional poison we feel at the injustice, and then we make them pay again for the same mistake.

In the dream of the planet it is normal for humans to suffer, to live in fear, and to create emotional dramas. The outside dream is not a pleasant dream; it is a dream of violence, a dream of fear, a dream of war, a dream of injustice. The personal dream of humans will vary, but globally it is mostly a nightmare. If we look at human society we see a place so difficult to live in because it is ruled by fear. Throughout the world we see human suffering, anger, revenge, addictions, violence in the street, and tremendous injustice. It may exist at different levels in different countries around the world, but fear is controlling the outside dream. If we compare the dream of human society with the description of hell that religions all around the world have promulgated, we find they are exactly the same. Religions say that hell is a place of punishment, a place of fear, pain, and suffering, a place where the fire burns you. Fire is generated by emotions that come from fear. Whenever we feel the emotions of anger, jealousy, envy, or hate, we experience a fire burning within us. We are living in a dream of hell. If you consider hell as a state of mind, then hell is all around us. Others may warn us that if we don’t do what they say we should do, we will go to hell. Bad news! We are already in hell, including the people who tell us that. No human can condemn another to hell because we are already there. Others can put us into a deeper hell, true. But only if we allow this to happen.

We keep searching and searching, when everything is already within us. There is no truth to find. Wherever we turn our heads, all we see is the truth, but with the agreements and beliefs we have stored in our mind, we have no eyes for this truth. We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering.

Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltecs called a mitote (pronounced MIH-TOE ‘-TAY). Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind — a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are. In India they call the mitote maya, which means illusion. It is the personality’s notion of “I am.”

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourself is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people’s demands. We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

During the process of domestication, we form an image of what perfection is in order to try to be good enough. We create an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody. We especially try to please the ones who love us, like Mom and Dad, big brothers and sisters, the priests and the teacher. Trying to be good enough for them, we create an image of perfection, but we don’t fit this image. We create this image, but this image is not real. We are never going to be perfect from this point of view. Never! Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. And the level of self-rejection depends upon how effective the adults were in breaking our integrity.

After domestication it is no longer about being good enough for anybody else. We are not good enough for ourselves because we don’t fit with our own image of perfection. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being what we wish to be, or rather what we believe we should be. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being perfect.

We know we are not what we believe we are supposed to be and so we feel false, frustrated, and dishonest. We try to hide ourselves, and we pretend to be what we are not. The result is that we feel unauthentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We are so afraid that somebody else will notice that we are not what we pretend to be. We judge others according to our image of perfection as well, and naturally they fall short…

We honor ourselves just to please other people. We even do harm to our physical bodies just to be accepted by others. You see teenagers taking drugs just to avoid being rejected by other teenagers. They are not aware that the problem is they don’t accept themselves. They reject themselves because they are not what they pretend to be. They wish to be a certain way, but they are not, and for this they carry shame and guilt. Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they would be. They become self-abusive and they use other people to abuse themselves as well. But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the judge, the victim, and the belief system that makes us do this.

In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit you will tolerate from someone else….and you tolerate it endlessly.

We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves…Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves: it is why we don’t accept ourselves…and why we don’t accept others the way they are.

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with god, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, ‘this is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy. This is possible, that is impossible…If you want to live a life of joy and fulfilment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change the smallest agreement? If we can see it is our agreements which rule our life, and we don’t like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements…that come from fear…Each time you break an agreement, all the power you use to create it returns to you.

EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT FREEDOM. ALL AROUND the world different people, different races, different countries are fighting for freedom. But what is freedom? In America we speak of living in a free country. But are we really free? Are we free to be who we really are? The answer is no, we are not free. True freedom has to do with the human spirit — it is the freedom to be who we really are. Who stops us from being free? We blame the government, we blame the weather, we blame our parents, we blame religion, we blame God. Who really stops us from being free? We stop ourselves. What does it really mean to be free? Sometimes we get married and we say that we lose our freedom, then we get divorced and we are still not free. What stops us? Why can’t we be ourselves? We have memories of long ago, when we used to be free and we loved being free, but we have forgotten what freedom really means. If we see a child who is two or three, perhaps four years old, we find a free human. Why is this human free? Because this human does whatever he or she wants to do. The human is completely wild. Just like a flower, a tree, or an animal that has not been domesticated — wild! And if we observe humans who are two years old, we find that most of the time these humans have a big smile on their face and they’re having fun. They are exploring the world. They are not afraid to play. They are afraid when they are hurt, when they are hungry, when some of their needs are not met, but they don’t worry about the past, don’t care about the future, and only live in the present moment. Very young children are not afraid to express what they feel. They are so loving that if they perceive love, they melt into love. They are not afraid to love at all. That is the description of a normal human being. As children we are not afraid of the future or ashamed of the past. Our normal human tendency is to enjoy life, to play, to explore, to be happy, and to love. But, what has happened with the adult human? Why are we so different? Why are we not wild? From the point of view of the Victim we can say that something sad happened to us, and from the point of view of the warrior we can say that what happened to us is normal. What has happened is that we have the Book of Law, the big Judge and the Victim who rule our lives. We are no longer free because the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system don’t allow us to be who we really are. Once our minds have been programmed with all that garbage, we are no longer happy.

This chain of training from human to human, from generation to generation, is perfectly normal in human society. You don’t need to blame your parents for teaching you to be like them. What else could they teach you but what they know? They did the best they could, and if they abused you, it was due to their own domestication, their own fears, their own beliefs. They had no control over the programming they received, so they couldn’t have behaved any differently. There is no need to blame your parents or anyone who abused you in your life, including yourself. But it is time to stop the abuse. It is time to free yourself of the tyranny of the Judge by changing the foundation of your own agreements. It is time to be free from the role of the Victim.

The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life — when the real you comes out, when you don’t care about the past and you don’t worry about the future. You are childlike. But there is something that changes all that: We call them responsibilities. The Judge says, “Wait a second, you are responsible, you have things to do, you have to work, you have to go to school, you have to earn a living.” All these responsibilities come to mind. Our face changes and becomes serious again. If you watch children when they are playing adults, you will see their little faces change. “Let’s pretend I’m a lawyer,” and right away their faces change; the adult face takes over. We go to court and that is the face we see — and that is what we are. We are still children, but we have lost our freedom.

The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves. But if we look at our lives we will see that most of the time we do things just to please others, just to be accepted by others, rather than living our lives to please ourselves. That is what has happened to our freedom. And we see in our society and all the societies around the world, that for every thousand people, nine hundred and ninety-nine are completely domesticated.

The worst part is that most of us are not even aware that we are not free. There is something inside that whispers to us that we are not free, but we do not understand what it is, and why we are not free. The problem with most people is that they live their lives and never discover that the Judge and the Victim rule their mind, and therefore they don’t have a chance to be free. The first step toward personal freedom is awareness. We need to be aware that we are not free in order to be free. We need to be aware of what the problem is in order to solve the problem. Awareness is always the first step because if you are not aware, there is nothing you can change. If you are not aware that your mind is full of wounds and emotional poison, you cannot begin to clean and heal the wounds and you will continue to suffer.

There is no reason to suffer. With awareness you can rebel and say, “This is enough!” You can look for a way to heal and transform your personal dream. The dream of the planet is just a dream. It is not even real. If you go into the dream and start challenging your beliefs, you will find that most of the beliefs that guided you into the wounded mind are not even true. You will find that you suffered all those years of drama for nothing. Why? Because the belief system that was put inside your mind is based on lies. That is why it is important for you to master your own dream; that is why the Toltecs became dream masters. Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. And you can change your life anytime if you aren’t enjoying the dream. Dream masters create a masterpiece of life; they control the dream by making choices. Everything has consequences and a dream master is aware of the consequences. To be Toltec is a way of life. It is a way of life where there are no leaders and no followers, where you have your own truth and live your own truth. A Toltec becomes wise, becomes wild, and becomes free again.

“THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THERE WAS A HUMAN just like you and me who lived near a city surrounded by mountains. The human was studying to become a medicine man, to learn the knowledge of his ancestors, but he didn’t completely agree with everything he was learning. In his heart, he felt there must be something more. One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say, “I am made of light; I am made of stars.”

He looked at the stars again, and he realized that it’s not the stars that create light, but rather light that creates the stars. “Everything is made of light,” he said, “and the space in-between isn’t empty.” And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information. Then he realized that although he was made of stars, he was not those stars. “I am in-between the stars,” he thought. So he called the stars the tonal and the light between the stars the nagual, and he knew that what created the harmony and space between the two is Life or Intent. Without Life, the tonal and the nagual could not exist. Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything. This is what he discovered: Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God. And he came to the conclusion that human perception is merely light perceiving light. He also saw that matter is a mirror — everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light — and the world of illusion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn’t allow us to see what we really are. “The real us is pure love, pure light,” he said. This realization changed his life. Once he knew what he really was, he looked around at other humans and the rest of nature, and he was amazed at what he saw. He saw himself in everything — in every human, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, in the earth. And he saw that Life mixed the tonal and the nagual in different ways to create billions of manifestations of Life.

In those few moments he comprehended everything. He was very excited, and his heart was filled with peace. He could hardly wait to tell his people what he had discovered. But there were no words to explain it. He tried to tell the others, but they could not understand. They could see that he had changed, that something beautiful was radiating from his eyes and his voice. They noticed that he no longer had judgment about anything or anyone. He was no longer like anyone else.

He could understand everyone very well, but no one could understand him. They believed that he was an incarnation of God, and he smiled when he heard this and he said, “It is true. I am God. But you are also God. We are the same, you and I. We are images of light. We are God.” But still the people didn’t understand him. He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people, a mirror in which he could see himself. “Everyone is a mirror,” he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themselves. And he realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light — the Dream of humans. Then he knew that he would soon forget all that he had learned. He wanted to remember all the visions he had had, so he decided to call himself the Smokey Mirror so that he would always know that matter is a mirror and the smoke in-between is what keeps us from knowing what we are. He said, I am the Smokey Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognize each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer.