Category: Four Agreements

Personal Power

There is often an interest to acquire more personal power.  This approach becomes a common trap in a spiritual warrior’s path.  The desire to gather personal power is often a compensating strategy for that feeling of not being powerful enough.

When you gain personal power based in this motivation your “I’m not powerful enough” story is being fed.  Gaining personal power becomes a remedy that doesn’t address the source of the problem, and can even makes it bigger.

Turn your attention to your desires, and the fears, beliefs, and self importance that spawn them and you will have a chance to become free.

How Long Does it Take to Master The Four Agreements

One of the larger problems with this process is managing the expectations of time. We imagine some finishing point or the mind wonders, “When will I be done?”

What we are really learning is how to live our life and how to express our selves with love and acceptance in every moment. That’s not something that you finish with. Expressing your self with love and acceptance is something that you keep going with.

Motivational Seminars

Motivational Seminars

I was talking with a client who has been working on my Self Mastery course and attended a couple of my events in the past year.  He’s done a number of self help and personal development things over the years so he has some experience.    He realized that what share is very different from those Motivational Seminars.

He doesn’t really care for those motivational seminars.  He said, “What they do is sell back to you your own dream.  They do get you excited and pumped up by believing in the possibility of the dream of your life that you hope for.  You provide your own dream and all the ingredients of hope, excitement, and motivation about your own dream.  You end up paying a lot of money when you are the one providing most of the material.

Spiritual Warrior

I use to be in awe of my fellow spiritual warriors.  I had the utmost respect for them.  There are very few people who have the courage to challenge their fears, judgments, and inner demons.

Spiritual Warriors still have my utmost respect.

However I am no longer hold them in awe.

I have come to realize that all those inner demons, fears, and that great big inner judge are not real.  They do exist, but they are not real.  They are creations of your imagination and only exist in the abstract.  The only power they have is from the faith you put in them.   They have no sustaining power of their own, or are any more real than a dream you had last night.  They exist only in the abstract imagination of the mind.

What you are really facing are projections of your imagination.  When put in that perspective, you realize that your inner demons are illusions.  Then it doesn’t take as much courage as I first assumed.

I still have the utmost respect for spiritual warriors that challenge the fears, judgments, and illusions in their mind.  However I no longer see it as taking extraordinary courage.    It’s really just a matter of common sense to rid your mind of these emotional drama making illusions.

Teachings of Miguel Ruiz

These are the words of don Miguel Ruiz. He is the author of the Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love. I don’t know which book they are from. Perhaps The Voice of Knowledge. The creator of this video didn’t seem to give a reference to the work. If these aren’t his exact words, then at least this is in alignment with his message.

These are the layers of the onion to be unraveled. To be free of your identity of the body. Then to be free of your identity of the mind. Then to be free to move beyond the Soul. To be life, the force that moves through all things. That is immortality. Life everlasting.

Advice

Bad Advice

Advice often comes from the Blind. People in emotional pain reach out, to anyone, even those that don’t know how to help. Although they try to help, and intend to help, they don’t. Sometimes they just make things worse.

In a forum someone wrote:

I am very miserbale and sometimes feel like giving up. What are some things that I can do to be happy. Do you know of any websites I could use?….ANYTHING
Are you happy?What makes you happy? — Miserable

One of the bits of advice they got back was:

Think about a warm puppy. Another person suggested to forget about your self for a while and focus on helping others.

Other bits were helpful, but too often people give advice that can’t be integrated. IF this person is really miserable then it is unlikely that they will be able to focus their attention on a warm puppy. They might think about a warm puppy, but jump to the fact that they want one but don’t have one. If a person doesn’t have the skill to focus their attention where they choose, then suggesting that they focus on something positive is not just a waste of time, but setting them up for failure. This will take them on a deeper downward spiral.
If a person is drowning, do you suggest to them that they try the breast stroke?

Then if a person is drowning in emotional suffering there are many good intentions, suggestions, and advice that don’t amount to a life raft or a helping hand. If you don’t have something that you know will help, then don’t throw anything that will help them sink further.

Self Mastery

Learning Self Mastery Skills takes Time

What does it take to learn the skills to master your attention, focusing your mind, beliefs, and your emotions?   These are all skills that lead to Self Mastery

In spite of what the inner judge expects, it will take some time.   How much time would you give your self to become good at playing a musical instrument?   Perhaps a year with hard work.  Even after that you would continue to improve on those skills for years afterwards.

The skills of mastering your mind and emotions deserves that same respect of time.

If this were just the knowledge that comes from reading or memorization then that would be a different matter.  But that isn’t the case.

Control Folly

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

Personal Freedom

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.