Common Sense Wisdom Based in the Four Agreements
Words aren’t the truth. Words are symbolic meanings for something real or abstract. Words are not truth so there is no sense in investing any faith in them.
But if you listen carefully to honest people you might find kernels of truth within the packaging of their words.
Speak Up For Your Self
Speaking up for your self doesn’t mean that you have to speak down to anybody.
A question from a subscriber to my on line course in Self Mastery,,,
Hello Gary,
I started reading The Four Agreements Companion Book yesterday and noticed that it had exercises like your Self Mastery program. The first exercise in the book was dealing with image of perfection but I’m still about ten sessions away from your Image of Perfection session.
I am aware that the sessions in your program are in an order for a purpose, so I wasn’t sure if it would be okay to continue reading the book or not.
Should I… continue reading the book and do the book exercises with your program? or stop reading the book until I finish your program?
Thanks for your time,
Curious
Hi Curious,
The Four Agreements Companion book is great and I recommend that you read it. However most people I’ve talked to that have attempted the exercises have gotten overwhelmed. They see so much of their belief system so fast without first having control over their attention that they slip into a victim point of view. That induces a feeling of overwhelm, powerlessness, and then hopelessness. Then their inner judge kicks in and berates them for failing. They lose motivation and close the book,,, stop the exercises… defeated. They end up feeling worse than when they started.
So that’s one of the reasons why I don’t start with the Image of Perfection beliefs. It’s also why I have people develop some other skills over their attention and beliefs before trying to change their whole belief system. It’s like eating beef. It’s much easier to do one bite at a time so you don’t get crushed by the whole animal.
By all means read the Four Agreements Companion Book. But, I’d suggest doing the exercises in the Self Mastery before starting the exercises in the book. And if you want to challenge and dissolve your Image of Perfection beliefs, (which is a necessary step to eliminating self judgments) then I suggest the using the steps in the Advanced Series of the Self Mastery program instead of the Four Agreements Companion book approach. In the Advanced Series I not only walk you through changing the Image of Perfection beliefs, but also walk you through the different issues of resistance that come up to letting these go.
After that, you’ll be better prepared to do the exercises suggested in the Four Agreements Companion book.
Hope that helps,
Gary
Original post at ToltecSpirit.com a Four Agreements resource for Spiritual Warriors
https://www.toltecspirit.com/2009/12/four-agreements-companion-book/
It’s actually a much harder life if you don’t change the fears and false beliefs that are driving your unhappiness.
The most common comment of resistance that I hear while guiding people through the process to change their beliefs and emotional driven behaviors is: “This is Hard.”
It’s a simple enough comment and we might easily accept it as true. But here’s the trap. It’s a lie that makes the changes you are attempting more difficult.
Yes it is difficult to change beliefs. It is challenging. However to say that it is hard, implies that doing nothing is easier. And this is a lie. It is actually harder to continue to live with the same false beliefs that are driving your unhappiness.
This post originally at Change is Hard
ToltecSpirit.com is a guide for Spiritual Warriors using the Four Agreements
Some people say change is hard. It’s one of those things that sounds true, but turns into a big lie. Change is challenging,,, but not to change,,,, that is a really hard way to live.
Awakening Consciousness
The human being is a pod. It is essentially a cocoon,,, for a seed of consciousness to mature and become self realized. Most human beings live their lives in varying degrees of unconsciousness, never giving birth to a fully mature consciousness.
There are associations that our mind makes, particularly where our self importance is concerned. We build a self image structure of beliefs. In that structure of beliefs we usually think of people in powerful positions, as being more important. The associated belief is that if we have less power, then we are less important. And to our belief system less importance means less worth.
The emotional math we do with our self image is to associate our self worth to our power. The more power we wield, the more important and valued we are. The less power we have, the the less we feel we are worth.
This is all to say that we use the subject of power to create beliefs about our self worth. While that may seem to make sense to some people,,,, what gets really weird is when you become aware of the kinds of power we usually use to base our self worth on.
Psychologists have been studying happiness lately. Since happiness can’t be measure directly they have to take surveys. To make their studies more credible they take a lot of surveys and apply statistics. But here is the thing statisticians will tell you. Correlation does not mean causation.
From all these surveys on happiness psychologists concluded that there are a number of habits or activities that happy people do. Their conclusion is that if you practice these habits or actions you can raise your level of happiness to be as happy as them. These activities include things like practicing gratitude, having a close social circle, gardening, and giving to the community.
But what if the correlaton is from the opposite direction. Perhaps thos happy people have a lot of love to share. What if the emotion of love coming out of them is so great that they have to share it in some way? Out of that need to express their love they build close social circles, engage in activities and with communities in a way of sharing the love coming out of them.
If your love coming out of you is so strong you will find channels to express that love through social circles, activities like gardening, and caring for your community.
It is the emotion of love that will drive your activities,,, not the activities that that will change your emotion to happiness.
For specific exercises for identifying and dissolving fear based beliefs, begin with the free practices in the Self Mastery audio program.
The original post on Happiness Statistics
So often we pretend to care about someone. We convince our self that we are concerned for their happiness. But when our emotions become a wave of reaction to them our own well being is now at stake. When this happens our caring for them becomes unduly influenced to try and make our self feel better. At this point our caring for them might more honestly be called selfishness.
For specific exercises for identifying and dissolving fear based beliefs based in the Four Agreements, begin with the free practices in the Self Mastery audio program.
The original post located at What it means to Care For Someone
The search for truth is often an iterative search.
Let’s say that you have a lot of false beliefs in your mind and they distort your perception and clarity of life, events, other people, and understanding your self. Let’s assume a number and say that 50% of your beliefs are false and 50% of your assumptions and beliefs are true. If you read a book that is 60-70% truth, it could have extraordinary insights on truth. It could open your mind to more truth and help shatter many of your illusions.
While it can be an incredible book that brings you clarity on so many things, you will still have 30-40% illusions in that book, and in your mind. Perhaps what is more interesting is that the clarity that book gives you might inspire you to faith in everything it says, even those things that are illusions. You become inspired and passionate about a book that is 30-40% illusions even though it gave you great insights. For you it is as if you found something that was “The Truth.”
Now imagine another scenario. Imagine that a person that lives under many more false beliefs than you do. Imagine someone’s mind where 70-80% of their beliefs are false, or distorted by false assumptions. Imagine that they read the same book that has truthful clarity of 60-70%.
Do you think that they will just completely understand and accept the information in that book? The truth of what that person reads will be in conflict with their existing set of beliefs. The ideas in that book will be in conflict with so much of what they already accept as true. The belief system in their mind will reject the ideas on the page as not true. To accept as true the material in that book would mean the collapse of so much of the structure of their belief system. This would be uncomfortable and in an effort to avoid that discomfort their mind would reject the new ideas even though they have greater clarity.
When the mind is full of illusions there is no room for the truth. The existing set of beliefs rejects any ideas that are contradictory to it’s current structure. When in search of The Truth it can be more valuable to empty your mind of false beliefs than to attempt to fill it up with more truthful ones.
For specific exercises for identifying and dissolving fear based beliefs based in the Four Agreements, begin with the free practices in the Self Mastery audio program.
The original post located at The Search for Truth
What is forgiveness?
Forgiveness is the process of detaching your faith from your belief in what “should” have happened, or what someone “should” have done. When you no longer hold on to that expectations, you are left accepting life as it is.
For specific exercises for identifying and dissolving fear based beliefs based in the Four Agreements, begin with the free practices in the Self Mastery audio program.
The original post located at What is Forgiveness?