Common Sense Wisdom Based in the Four Agreements
Do You consciously create your own reality.
During the first couple years of my personal and spiritual growth I found this to be true. Later, in a massive awakening of my self importance, I realized the magnitude of the illusion behind this belief.
In the expansion of consciousness that accompanied these realizations I discovered compassion.
It now seems impossible to me to hold to this belief that people create their own reality and be compassionate at the same time.
I will opt for compassion.
JW. asks about Control Folly
So I’m battling with this idea of controlled folly. ( I think I know what you would say, don’t believe in controlled folly, lol). Do you have your own personal idea of what that is? I have a couple of interpretations of what that means. One would be to live in a state of love and grace while still respecting peoples fear boundary’s. Another would be to extract deeper meaning from what people say while still acting like there is little meaning in the way things happen.
Thanks for your time Gary, I always appreciate hearing from you.
JW
Dear JW.
For a Spiritual Warrior Control Folly doesn’t have much value as a practice until they have cleaned their mind of all old beliefs and social domestication. At that point a warrior has the option to act in any circumstance with an infinite number of choices. Any one of his actions is completely unimportant. However if a Spiritual Warrior chooses, he will engage in the experience in a way that is deeply connected and meaningful. That is Control Folley.
To engage in a way that is with complete respect and with unconditional love is just the common sense choice to be Impeccable.
Control Folly is really only something that can be done once a Warrior has cleaned their mind of old beliefs and dispensed with all their old habits. Until then a person can too easily delude themselves into believing they are making a choice.
Gary
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. – John Kenneth Galbraith
Learning to think for your self requires that you first un-learn how society and the world taught you to think.
Since we are so enmeshed in our own world of thinking and beliefs it isn’t a straight forward process. It is further complicated by the fact that you only have at your disposal your current thinking process to figure out how to dissolve your thinking.
You can not be sitting in your current belief system and use it to get our of the belief system you are in.
This is one of the reasons why the Nagual (Guide to the Spirit) provides the minimal chance for a Spiritual Warriors personal freedom.
Loyalty, like any trait, can be an exemplary quality stemming from your integrity, and it can also be your down fall into misery.
To stay in your integrity you will need to balance loyalty with flexibility and freedom.
A personal development program or Spiritual Teacher doesn’t empower individuals. No program or person can “empower” someone. People already have extraordinary personal power. It’s just that people typically expend their extraordinary power on ordinary activities and limiting fear based beliefs.
A Teacher doesn’t empower you. A Teacher or process assists you in clearing away the fears, illusions, and beliefs that have trapped your personal power. Thereby making it free for you to use.
In the beginning was the word.
Shortly there after came misinterpretation, assumptions, and misunderstandings.
Then came the chaos.
Beyond the Opinions of Right and Wrong is Heaven
Judgment Day Is When You Judge Your Self For the Last Time
In the Mystery schools around the world there are similar themes of a Judgment Day. Often it is interpreted to mean the end of the world. Perhaps it means something else.
In Egypt the story is told in hieroglyphics of the pharaoh on the day of his last judgment. He stands before the 40 judges and his heart is weighed against a feather on a balance scale. If his heart is lighter than a feather he may pass through and enjoy the paradise of the next life with Isis and Osiris.
In the Christian Mystery school there is a similar view of being born again. After being born again the world will be completely brand new. If we studied the mythologies around the world we would find similar themes. So often this theme is interpreted as meaning that the body has to die in order to live in the “next world”. So often this is a mistake. Rumi writes of this world when he says, “There is a field out beyond right and wrong. I will meet you there.”
The Last Judgment is when you judge yourself for the last time. From that moment forward your life begins brand new. You will no longer see yourself or the world the same way. You no longer look to see if someone is right or wrong, or to be right or wrong. Your mind is once again child like in its purity. The way it was before it learned to judge itself with ideas of being bad or good.
Childlike does not mean being innocent. We have garnered too much experience for that. It does mean that we are wise. Wisdom is in that field beyond the knowledge of right and wrong. In that field the heart flourishes because it is not busy with being right or afraid of being wrong. Wisdom is the awareness that love and compassion are the only righteous answers. Wisdom is the field where Rumi stands waiting for us.
On the practical side, when we go to deal with our inner voice of judgment, we find that it can be a tricky force. To stop our judgments we must be come aware of them in order to change them. As soon as we notice ourselves in judgment, we tell ourselves we shouldn’t do that. And what do you know, our inner judge has judged us for our judgments. The inner judge then just might go further and judge ourselves for judging ourselves for our judgments. The inner judge, as ridiculous as it is, can stack these up until we forget how it started.
My favored approach to dealing with this judge of nonsensical logic is to laugh. Seriously, laugh. Try it. When you really see the silly nature of the inner judge, it’s hard not to. Don’t take your judgments, or yourself, too seriously. Instead, be child like and laugh. This will bring you closer to being born into a brand new world. Like a child, without the weight of judgments your heart will be lighter than a feather.
If you are not choosing your emotions, then what is?
Free Will and the Personal Power to Choose
Is there such a thing as freewill? Do each of us have freewill? First, let’s clarify it. Free will: the ability to consciously choose. Just for fun, let’s conduct a quick inventory and see what happens. Did you choose to have breakfast? Did you choose to take a shower this morning? Or, did this stuff just kind of happen automatically, and later in the morning you found yourself at work? Ever done that, get to work and didn’t really remember driving there? Did you consciously choose the way to work or did you take the same route you always take? Do you remember consciously choosing every lane change?
If you exercised choice in even just some of these then you must have it. If you didn’t, maybe you have it, but just aren’t using it.
Now it gets a little tougher. How do you feel about your day? Has something got you upset or stressed? Are you joyful and grateful all the time? Take a quick inventory of the emotional states you have gone through today, or even this week. Did you consciously choose any of them? Did you choose all of them? Be ruthlessly honest with yourself here. If you were cut off on the freeway by one of those unconscious drivers, how did you react? Did you choose your reaction? Could you have chosen or was your reaction already there before there was a chance to choose? There are a lot of questions, but take your time.
Now lets try something different. Think about what you are most grateful for in your life. Think about it long and hard. Now, how does it make you feel? Allow yourself to focus on this and as you do let the gratitude grow in your body. Settle on this for a few minutes and you may find yourself in a place of great gratitude, a wonderful emotion.
If you did the exercise you found that you have conscious choice over your emotions. So you do have free will with your emotions. Now the really tough questions. How often do you consciously choose how you feel? Do remember to choose when someone is pushing your buttons? Do you choose while driving your car, at the grocery store, with your family? If you did the exercise you know an emotional state is just a choice.
One of my biggest heroes is Nelson Mandela. Why? After decades in prison, when he was released, he embraced his captors. He had compassion for them. His will was so strong that he won over any emotional reaction. When we exercise our freewill we make it strong, just like a muscle. If he can do it after a near life time in prison, for sure, we can do it in our relatively comfortable world.
There is much in the world that we can not change. But we can choose how we feel. If we have difficulty changing our emotional state, it may be we have let the muscles of our freewill grow weak through neglect.
One other question to ponder: If we aren’t choosing how we feel, then whom are we leaving that choice up to?
We search and yearn for something to fulfill us but what is it?
It was years ago, and I was sitting with a couple warriors and a man who was attending a power journey. He seemed to be a very happy man and had his life very well in order. He was quite wealthy and contributed his money to different organizations and charities. He enjoyed doing so.
He sat about and wondered what he should do with his life. He seemingly had it all. At the time I did not have the awareness and clarity that I do now. At the time I saw a very nice man doing very well, very generous, and that had his life in a nice order. What I didn’t notice was that he was still looking. He was wondering what he should do, or create. What I didn’t notice was that he was not satisfied and fulfilled.
If I were to see that man today, I know what I would recommend to him. I would suggest to him that he express and experience all the love from his heart. When you experience all your love coming out of your heart you stop searching. You have found what you are looking for.
The greatest gift you will ever experience is the Love you express.
In his book The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz describes what he calls the parasite. This concept, and others similar to it such as “inorganic beings” often bring up questions in people’s minds. Someone sent me such a question and I decided to post my answer below. I hope to bring some common sense awareness to the issue and dissipate some of the superstition and fears around it. (please be patient with the grammar as English was not this person’s first language.)
DEAR GARY,
AS I AM NEW TO THE TOLTEC PATH, I WOULD LIKE TO ASK YOU A QUESTION.
IT´S ABOUT INORGANIC BEINGS
I DID A SEARCH ON THE NET AND FOUND THAT SOME PEOPLE TALK ABOUT ANGELS, ALLIES, FRIENDS, AND INORGANIC BEINGS. SOME SAID THAT THEY TAKE ALL OUR ENERGY, AND WE ARE LIKE SLAVES TO THEM, WE GIVE THEM ENERGY THEY GIVE US INFORMATION ABOUT OTHERS DIMENSIONS.
OTHER SAYS THAT WE HAVE TO FEAR THEM. THEY ARE ALL POWERFUL. I FOUND ONE GUY WHO SELLS CRYSTALS WHICH TAKE ALL THEIR ENERGY BACK TO US. HE SAYS THEY ARE LIKE VAMPIRES AND DEMONS AND WE CANNOT DO ANYTHING IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD WITHOUT THEM. THERE’S A LOT OF THINGS WHICH SEEMS THEY ARE GODS, AND WE SLAVES.
COULD YOU PLEASE TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT INORGANIC BEINGS?
THANKS, JORGE
FROM RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
(SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH)
__________
Hello Jorge,
Carlos Castenada mentions this in the Active Side of Infinity. Don Juan describes it as the “topic of topics.”
I’ve let this question sit in my mailbox for a few days deciding what to do with it. Just the name “inorganic beings” conjures up mystery and for many that means confusion. Confusion leads to guesses, assumptions, and wanderings of the imagination in speculation. Sometimes this can lead to superstition and fear. The more you write and speak about it the more attention, discussion, and distortion people are likely to stir up. It’s not my intent to stir up fear and superstition but rather to dispel it. At the risk of more confusion and distortion I decided to publish my response anyways.
When we make explanations about these energy beings they are generally done in metaphor. It has to be done in metaphor because that is what words are. Abstract terminology like “energy, entity, dreams, taking our energy, gods, slaves, and power” all add to the confusion, and often create superstition. That superstition can lead to fear. Fear is the big demon that sucks your energy. Of course once you have fear of some “entity” that can not be seen you then might want to protect your self as a reaction to unknown threat. Trade your money for a crystal to protect your self and you have compensated for your fear. You sill have your fear, but you have put your faith in the idea that the crystal will protect you so you balance it out emotionally with a feeling of safety.
And so the chain reaction of personal power bleeding events goes.
In short, inorganic beings exist. Don Miguel Ruiz even refers to them as a “parasite” that eats our energy and doesn’t’ give us anything back. Ekhardt Tolle refers to the “pain body” as behaving as a living being. In the West we might be more familiar with the term “ego” or the term collective unconscious is used by psychologist. It’s no different than what we are used to, but since the culture has a different language we don’t know what they are referring to and that can cause confusion.
Fears are one example of something inorganic that you can feel possessed by. Very simply you can consider your mind such an energy being. All the voices in your head talking have taken on a life of their own. The mind is not you and for most people it doesn’t obey your wishes. It keeps chattering even though you want it to be silent at times. Very simply it is a living being with a life of its own and for most people it is not under control. A simple test of this is to sit still and do your best to quiet your mind. When you do that you will see what I mean.
In heightened states of awareness you can see the field of energy that don Miguel calls a parasite. They can look like clouds of smoke, or fog that surrounds a person’s body. It is a cloud of beliefs and emotions that distort a person’s perceptions. If you were talking to someone and you didn’t believe a word they said, you might say, “They live in a dream world.” We’ll imagine that that dream world that surrounds a person is the belief system of their ego and that it looks like a field of fog. You can visualize that field of illusions in someones mind a different way, but this is the way I visualize it.
What does your ego or parasite eat and how do they get our energy? They principally eat our emotions, and our faith. Faith is a life force energy or one type of personal power that we can express. When we put faith into a conceptual idea or an opinion we give it life in our mind. When we believe thoughts in our head, we give them power and life. They become bigger. The more we believe them, the bigger and more powerful forces they become in our life. When we believe strongly in something that has a lot of emotion we can then react to those beliefs and that emotion.
When we put enough faith in those conceptual ideas in our head we start acting upon them. Those beliefs start dictating our actions. For example if we believe: “Inorganic beings can suck our energy, then we will fear them. If we get this crystal and wear it we will be protected.” These are just conceptual ideas, and if we believe them they become alive in our mind. We are in effect giving life to conceptual ideas in an effort to keep other conceptual ideas at bay. The conceptual ideas tell us what we have to do to protect ourselves from other conceptual ideas. These are just assumptions. We give up our free will to these assumptions, opinions, beliefs and fears. That is how humans become slaves to these beliefs in the mind.
Years ago different societies created grandiose ideas that they believed in as a society. Because everyone believed in them together they became gods over large numbers of people. There was Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, etc. The people put their faith and emotions of love and fear into those conceptual ideas. Those conceptual ideas became powerful forces in their life. They were gods that the people served but they were not real. They only existed as conceptual ideas in people’s mind. Yet the faith and emotion they created around these gods were real. The amount of faith and emotion invested by humans made these gods powerful.
Years later, nobody believes in those gods and because nobody puts their faith in them they have no power. Because no one believed in them they could no longer exist. If you don’t want to be under the influence of inorganic beings and entities, then don’t believe them. Yes they exist as dreams, but don’t believe in assumptions, opinions, judgments, or conceptual ideas that they convey. Very simply don’t believe in lies. That is all the protection you need.
The challenge is that they can be very tricky and subtle. Today we wouldn’t believe in silly gods of Zeus and Apollo. But we might believe our own opinions. We often believe the voice in our head that is speaking to us. It tells us “I shouldn’t have done that” and we believe. It is just habit. It is a little god in our head that judge’s us that we are wrong, or ugly, or an idiot. It rules our life like a tyrant. The inner judge tells us bad things will happen if we disobey it. We create fear and feed it fear when we think about disobeying that voice in our head.
Often the little gods in our head (“parasite”) are backed up by larger gods of society and culture. Religions and expectations of society support the little gods in our mind and that congruency of assumptions make the little voice appear to be telling the truth. In reality these norms are just conceptual ideas that are accepted and believed by the majority of the people in that culture. If you go into another culture they have a different set of beliefs and to them your beliefs look like silly superstitions.
Years ago people believed that slavery was an acceptable way of treating people. Very recently apartheid was an acceptable social norm in South Africa. You can see that apartheid is just a conceptual idea. It doesn’t exist as anything more than a set of beliefs. When people change what they believe, apartheid laws no longer have power over their mind. We could say that apartheid was just a dream of conceptual ideas powered by the energy of people’s faith. It was an idea that humans give life to, and then that idea ruled their behavior.
Not all inorganic beings, entities, and dreams drain on our energy. If you listen to the first session of my Self Mastery Program you will notice that I am inviting you to create the emotion of gratitude. By creating that emotion you are developing your own personal living dream of emotion. It is your own god of gratitude. Except that it doesn’t rule you. You create it. What you will notice about this meditation is that I don’t invite or suggest that you believe anything in order to do this. It is a simple exercise of perceiving and expressing. In this way you don’t expend any personal power of your faith but you still benefit with the enjoyment of a beautiful dream of emotion.
By expressing the emotion of gratitude you are creating your own cloud made of the emotions that come from love. We are going to create and feel emotions so why not create emotions that we enjoy. It is your creation and is dependent on you. You created it and you give it life. In return it gives you a good feeling. Because it doesn’t require you to believe anything, it doesn’t drain your faith. That means it is not a parasite. Because it helps to keep your eyes open and enjoying life. It is an ally that helps you stay in love and gratitude.
By staying in love and gratitude you are not expressing fear and feeding the dream of the parasite. The more you practice this exercise, the less you are directing your faith into conceptual ideas that create fear. Expressing love and gratitude will help you to be free of the parasite more than a crystal.
In the rest of the Self Mastery exercises I teach about taking an inventory of your beliefs so that you can identify these conceptual ideas and recover your faith and emotions from those dreams in the mind.
There is no need to fear inorganic beings, entities, the parasite, or any of those things. They are just dreams. As humans we create them. They are completely dependent on us for life. As we become more aware they will no longer be able to hypnotize us with their conceptual ideas. Those beings might be afraid of us gaining this awareness because it will be their end. But their fear is not our fear. It is the nature of the conscious evolution of the humans that we create and dream with more love and less fear.
That is just the evolution of consciousness. In your personal dream of consciousness you can go as fast as you wish beyond fear and into clarity and love. The more you change your personal dream from one of fear to a dream of love, the more your personal dream affects the collective dream of humanity. This is why one of the greatest gifts you can give humanity is to be express love and be happy in your life. If you do this, then when you die you will leave a giant inorganic field of love for the people you leave behind.
I hope this helps.
Gary van Warmerdam