Common Sense Wisdom Based in the Four Agreements
A spiritual warrior’s life is faithful journey through two worlds. With one arm, he reaches out. With complete abandon he grasps hold of intent which hurls him through unknown worlds of his fears, to exploding fields of light, and a completely irrational, and unreasonable, experience of unconditional love.
With the other hand, he strains to touch the earth and walk a path of clear and impeccable actions in a material world of full of nonsense.
The “mitote” (me-toe-tay) as described in The Four Agreements, refers to the cacophony of voices in your head. They are all talking but none of them seem to listen.
The mitote is driven by all those false beliefs, self importance, fears, layers of denial and justifications. As you become aware the mitote can appear to be an endless stream of useless chatter talking over itself. Try to turn it off in the beginning and you get a lesson in humility. As you learn to observe it with neutrality, which is a critical step in dissolving the mitote, you find that it often tricks you by pulling your attention into the conversation.
Yes,,, it is a matrix of illusions. But you can keep it all straight when you are aware that the truth is simple, so simple that it doesn’t need words.
This article makes sens if you look at things from a scientific viewpoint. However, the scientific viewpoint doesn’t account for how awareness, consciousness, and the penetrating force of LIfe impacts the brain. If you don’t include consciousness as one of the parameters that you are observing you will miss the cause and believe erroneous conclusions.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain.
The study is one of the first to use individuals with traumatic brain injury to determine this connection. Researchers say the implication of this connection means people in many disciplines, including peace studies, health care or religion can learn different ways to attain selflessness, to experience transcendence, and to help themselves and others.
The rest of the article is at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217124156.htm
This is like claiming that leaves create chlorophyll by ignoring the role of sunlight. But understandable because these scientists haven’t yet figured out how to measure consciousness, and those other elements that affect matter. But that’s not surprising when you consider that as far as they are concerned, those things don’t exist. It’s kind of a Catch-22 where they will never see the impact from something because they have already concluded it isn’t there. It is quite difficult to find something when you assume it doesn’t exist.
Lesson to be applied here: Don’t Make Assumptions
For an intro on how you can affect your brain by focusing your attention start with this article from the Wall Street Journal.
http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/News/wsj_1-19-07_begley.html
Some people think that anger is a valuable or important step in personal change. Your anger rising high enough will motivate you to change. There are some benefits to anger, but this isn’t one of them.
Anger is an emotional reaction. When it is strong enough it can bring your attention to an issue. In that moment your tolerance for the situation, or your behavior, is exceeded and you make a commitment to change. It is not your anger that makes the change happen. It is your attention and your commitment to change that will make the difference.
If you want to make changes in your life, relationships, or your self, letting things go to until you end up angry is not required. What is required for change is your attention to the matter and your resolve to make it happen.
For more on how to make changes in your life listen and practice the exercises in self awareness in the Self Mastery audio program.
We like our Spirituality clean. That is to say we like our spiritual journey to be clean, neat, filled with lots of wonderful happy experiences, and love. If that’s all you want you can at best go,,, half way.
That kind of spiritual journey ignores or denies dealing with the ego, self importance, fears, and various other illusions in the mind. Coming face to face with your inner demons like the Judge, or Victim aspects of your personality are a dirty affair. Being honest with our lack of impeccability, how we judge our self, or other people, is humbling. Miss those opportunities, and you miss out on dissolving the ego.
This business of cleaning up and dissolving your fears is dirty as well. You can’t move through your fear of death, loneliness, or what others think of you, by looking at it from afar. Nope. You have to get dirty. Be present with with those fears,,, and stay aware and awake at the same time. That’s how your emotional body gets cleaned of fears and emotional wounds. If you try and stay “clean” in this work you will miss those wounds. You’ll end up having a nicely spiritual coat over your emotional wounds.
Challenge your inner demons and you will lose your attention to their tricks more often in the beginning than you will win. You will take your licks as you learn to play their game better than they do. You will have some falls into muddy emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and perhaps even touch hopelessness now and again. With some good training, and practice you can keep your self clean. But you will get dirty along the way.
Yes this spiritual journey is dirty business. At least it can be that way in the beginning. Later, if you’ve cleaned up your emotional wounds, and dissolved your self importance, it takes on that bright sparkling look, and may even have a lemon fresh scent to it.
But for now, it’s okay that this spiritual work is dirty business.
From a subscriber of my Self Mastery Audio Program,
Dear Gary,
I am beginning to see who I am not. It is liberating.
Much gratitude,
Your friend, Self Discovery.
Hello Self Discovery,
Yes this is the beginning. To discover your self is a treasure hunt. You do not begin with an answer of what the treasure is. No not at all. You begin by digging away the dirt that lies between you and the treasure.
In the beginning it is not about realizing or knowing what or who you are. But rather about realizing what you are NOT, and detaching from that.
God Speed and Good Hunting,
Gary
“I’ll do better next time.” It’s an optimistic thought. However, without a good dose of healthy self reflection on what happened last time, we are likely to repeat the same mistake.
Doing better next time takes more than just a commitment to the idea and goal. Without awareness of the lessons learned about the past, there is little chance that we will break free of these patterns. Surprisingly most self help courses or advice doesn’t provide any tools, systems, or techniques for reviewing past patterns, learning from them, or making changes in our self based on what we find. Most just rely on the hollow, but well intentioned, commitment.
Without awareness of the things you overlooked in your past choices and patterns of the past, you will miss those same things next time. A committment, no matter how well intentioned probably won’t take you as far in doing better as awareness.
Do better next time,,, reflect on past patterns and choices until you see where you went wrong. Then reflect on your self until you can see why you missed those critical observations in those moments. That will be a start. What assumptions did you make, why and how did you make them? When you can see how your mind projects assumptions in the moment and you can suspend your belief in them, that is awareness. And that is when you will have an opportunity to make a better choice next time.
We were socialized to be anti-social.
Don’t talk to Strangers… instead fear strangers.
It’s important to be right… that means that you are probably going to alienate someone by pointing out how the are wrong.
You have to earn respect.
Happiness and feeling good comes with accomplishment. Therefore it is not intrinsic to what and who you are. Hold off feeling good about your self.
Lock your doors. Be afraid.
If you do something wrong you deserve to be punished. Not forgiven.
We learned to live by other people’s rules of punishment and reward. When we grow up we eventually discover that living by other people’s rules doesn’t work for us anymore.
Until we understand our socialization, what don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements calls Domestication, we won’t be able to change it. The key to change is an inventory of your beliefs.
Hi Gary, There has been a lot of speculation on the doomsday theory of 2012 that many say was prophesized by the Mayans and other ancient cultures. Seeing as you would know more about Mesoamerican civilizations I was wondering if you can offer some insight on this theory or the significance of 2012 on the Mayan Calendar. Thanks, Adam.
The cycle of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 Apocalypse. What does it mean?
The end of one of the cycles for the Mayan calendar is in 2012. It was customary in the ancient Mesoamerican tradition to periodically let go of all the old traditions, beliefs, and myths, of the past at the end of each cycle. Collectively as a culture they dropped all their baggage. They took a careful look at everything in their culture to determine what worked the best and what didn’t work. With scrutiny and skepticism they tossed outdated theories, methodologies, customs and practices and adopted a new way of life.
In this way their entire society took a leap forward in culture, science, architecture, agriculture, medicine, and spirituality. Most civilizations creep along in growth, attempting to keep the old structures but making changes to them. The result is out dated systems, bureaucracy, red tape, and superstition with changes built on top of them.
We often build systems to last but not with the flexibility to change and adapt with the circumstances, or new discoveries. The wise men and women of ancient time understood that everything changes. They understood that to evolve their society they would have to change their systems also.
Imagine doing that today. Imagine a periodic overhaul of the legal system, education system, environmental policy, health care, and energy policy. Imagine taking the best of what we know about what works in these areas and applying it 100%. Most importantly this means dropping what doesn’t work well without any resistance from the old paradigms. This is what they did. They were masters of detachment and it allowed them to make giant leaps forward in their society.
To outsiders it would appear as the end of the world. It would appear to be the end of the world of beliefs that people operated by. It would mean dramatic change by letting go of all the beliefs, ideology, habits, and customs that you were accustomed and attached to. Your world and your life would change dramatically.
When people describe Mayan prophecy of 2012 and refer to an apocalypse I have to wonder what the fears in their mind are projecting. In letting go of the world of habits that we are familiar with it is uncomfortable. We get comfortable with the familiar, even if it involves inefficiencies, hardship, and suffering. But dramatic changes in your world doesn’t mean that it has to be bad.
What if you did this same process in your personal life? Would the end of your virtual world of beliefs and emotions of suffering be okay with you? Would the end of what doesn’t work about your relationships, career, attitudes, internal dialog of thoughts, and unhappy emotions be a challenging shift? Certainly it would but the Mayans and Toltecs were not afraid of change. They knew they would adopt the best of what worked in these areas and continue on.
One of the difficulties of letting go of our old world of beliefs is that it is very difficult to imagine life with out them. In fact, in many ways it is impossible. While we are enmeshed in old paradigms we are unable to see how our new life will work. The wise men and women of ancient Mexico knew this, and so they didn’t even try. They consciously challenged and overcame their fears that would have them cling to habits of the past. They practiced letting go without knowing exactly what their future would be. It was an act of faith. It was a supreme act of detachment that ensured their freedom from fear and emotional suffering caused by attachments to their past.
In this approach to change we do not know what the coming world will be. We could even say that it does not exist because it hasn’t been created yet. With this perspective we more completely dissolve the past and live in the moment. We sidestep the mind’s tendency to project beliefs from the past into the our mental future. By saying that the world will end as we know it, we free our self from these projections of the mind and the limiting paradigms they contain. This gives us greater freedom to create with more choices in our new life.
To help accomplish this supreme act of detachment the Mayans and Toltecs even structured their language to describe it as the end of the world. They refrained from talking about or even imagining that another world would exist… until they built it for real. This is one of the artful processes of their language and spiritual practices that helped them be present and live in the moment.
The truth is that we have an opportunity to do this kind of change ritual everyday. Each night we lay down to sleep and let go. However, most people live the next day in just about the exact same patterns as previous days. How many patterns of emotions, thoughts, and relationship drama, do you live out today that you have done before? The Mayans, Toltecs, and other traditions set times and created practices to consciously make these changes so they did not fall asleep in old habits like these.
The prophecy of the Mayan calendar that the world will end in 2012 is a metaphor. However if your mind is fertile ground for fear, you will use the idea to create fearful stories and beliefs. To be aware of how your mind generates fear with stories of the end of the world is an opportunity to detach from them. And you don’t have to wait until 2012 to do so.
The audio program in Self Mastery provides a series of exercises to help you identify and change old patterns of behaviors, emotions, and beliefs.