The challenge is not just to love. We’ve all done that quite successfully and easily as children. The greater challenge is to love with awareness that the world is a difficult place, where people are not always kind, or what we want them to be. The challenge is not to love people when they are beautiful, but to love them when they are not.
The challenge is also to love and accept your self, even when don’t measure up to your beliefs about what you should be. This is a spiritual warrior’s challenge.
“The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
I would say to this that the “world in which you live” is a reference to the belief system of our mind. It is a virtual world of symbolic language and images that we use to understand the outside world of reality. As much as it is a tool to communicating and understanding the Reality, it in effect blinds us from perceiving Reality directly.
It is the dismantling or destroying this virtual world of the mind that can seem frightening, and at the same time exciting in its feeling of liberation.
In the field of the Four Agreements this one is a reminder of “Don’t Make Assumptions”
My friend studied political science. He said politics was basically a scramble for power. But power is a need to control,,,, and a need to control is only necessary if you are afraid. So the scramble for power is really just a reaction to fear. If we really want to study political science we need to understand fear. Power is just the tail being wagged by the dog.
The irony here is that those that seek power often do so because they are powerless over their fear.
As a spiritual warrior,,, you will not develop real personal power until you develop awareness and win over your mind from fear.
In the basic quest of morality and ethics “right” trumps “wrong”. In Advances levels of morality and ethics,,,, Love and Respect trump “being right”. The challenge for those who are attached to “being right” is that if they cling too tightly,,, love and respect appear to be wrong.
Sometimes making changes in your beliefs, emotions, relationships, and elsewhere in your life is counter-intuitive.
When you are riding a bicycle,,, how do you turn the bike to the right? You turn the handlebars to the left. How do you change the negative thoughts in your head? We’ll maybe you get the best results in a similar way. Don’t try to push more positive ones on top of them. Sometimes when you do you end up going in a negative direction.
Turning the handlebars to the right in order to turn the bike to the right makes logical sense if you aren’t aware of the other factors like the gyroscopic effect of precession. Don’t know what you are doing when it comes to changing your beliefs or emotional reactions and you are likely to end up goring in the wrong direction.
The Self Mastery Course can help steer you in the right direction. Some of the things might seem counter-intuitive, but they will make more sense when you have more awareness of how belief systems operate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
