Self Mastery 3 - Toltec Spirit

Misconception about Anger

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.

Self Discovery

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

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

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.

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.

Free Will: The Choice to be Happy

Free Will:

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?

Inorganic Beings and the Parasite

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

Circle of Fire Prayer

Power of Prayer to Strengthen Your Connection to Life

Growing up a in a Catholic family and being highly skeptical I didn’t appreciate prayer much. To say that I rebelled would be more accurate. What I found with prayer is that the power is not in the words. The words are just a mechanism with which we can direct our attention and intent.

Prayer can be a powerful force. It is so because we put our intent behind it. We focus our attention, our emotion, and our personal intent in the direction of our desire. Our prayers are also in the direction of Love. This aligns us with the natural intent of Life and furthers the strength of our Word. Miguel Ruiz was generous to provide us with an intent for our lives that helped guide us to our integrity and love. He took that expression of Life and put it into words as cleanly as he possibly could. He called it the Circle of Fire prayer. The depth of meaning and way of life that it has guided me to has been revealed over years.

Today, is the day of the Lord, when the Divinity returns to us.

When living our Free Will, and with all the Power of our Spirit,

We decide to live our lives in free Communion with God,

With no Expectations.

We will live our lives with Gratitude, Love, Loyalty and Justice,

Beginning with Ourselves,

And continuing with our Brothers and Sisters.

We will respect all Creations as the Symbol or our Love communion

With the One who Created us.

To the Eternal Happiness of Humanity.

from Prayers, a book by don Miguel Ruiz

Simple Happiness

Being Happy is easy, once you eliminate what makes you unhappy.

Happiness it is such a simple thing. Yet in the realm of emotions, simple does not mean easily attainable. Particularly as we have been taught to be rewarded for a more complex intellect. All our effort to get good grades in school and be successful, has largely been an effort to think more complexly. This includes having a lot of serious opinions. Thus pushing away being simply happy. In our complex opinions , we get lost in emotions of frustration, anger, sadness, jealousy, and…. well,,,, you have the idea. We are no longer just happy.

If you are to change our emotional state then it seems that a shift in attitude would be in order. After all, if we are in a different emotional state, a different attitude is present. But if we are to change our attitude, then perhaps it would be easy to start with changing an opinion. Now switching sides on an opinion, that can sometimes be tough. I don’t know too many people who just up and switch political parties. So lets start with shifting our opinions on things that have less emotional investment. And then we can build from there. Once you are able to shift your opinions you will find it easier to shift your emotions.

What can you find in your inventory of opinions that you could let go of, or change? For instance, an opinion about the weather. How tough would that be? Try it. When you notice an emotional reaction to the weather, see what the opinion is and just as an experiment, decide to not believe your own opinion.

Then maybe try it about what someone else is wearing. Continue practicing on these little ones. Then, maybe work up to what your opinion is about someone else. Then, maybe don’t believe the opinions you have about yourself. Try it just as an experiment.

You might try these shifts with other people. Where you might instinctively disagree with someone, catch it, and just for practice, agree with them. You don’t need to do this in cases that are critical to your life just things about the weather, politics, fashion, or a sporting event.

You might find that after a while that your attitude about the weather has changed. And your attitude towards other people has changed. You might also find that how you treat yourself has changed. What will sneak up on you though, is more of a simple feeling of happiness.

When I entered into the process of transforming my personal dream, I did so to be happy, no matter what. I soon stumbled upon a man who was happy, don Miguel. What I found out about him was that he rarely had an opinion in his head. I found that he is a very simple man. He has the capacity to be complexly brilliant, no doubt about that. He use to be a medical doctor. But he prefers to be simply happy instead. I think this is a brilliant decision, but that is just my opinion.

Here is another trick to help you let go of opinions.

Whenever possible and appropriate try the following. When someone asks you for your opinion, let your response be, “I don’t know.” You might also do this even when you have a ready opinion to share. Doing this then will be even more helpful in letting go of your opinions.

One of the ways we are often asked for our opinion is by people first giving us theirs, and then they ask us to agree with them (or sometimes disagree with them). This is a perfect time for “I don’t know.” You may find that tossing the conversation back in their court will take off some of their surprise and possible discomfort. A simple way to do this is to ask them a question in return such as: “I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. What do you think about it?” or “I don’t know. But can tell me how you came up with your point of view on the issue.”

If we practice letting go of our opinions we will find we have changed quite a bit. With out our opinions, we let go of the attitude of being right. We also let go of the attitude of others being wrong. We also don’t need to carry around all those justifications to prove those points of view. In this way life is becoming simpler. If we let go of our well justified and defended complex opinions, certainly we will change. But perhaps this is what will make us simply happy.

Service as a Spiritual Practice

Spiritual service is most beneficial when it lessens self importance.

One does not enter the gates of heaven by works alone, but by grace. In the apprenticeships of students to monasteries, ashrams, and mystery schools of all sorts, the students would be required to work for their stay. They would scrub the floors, wash the clothes, make the meals, and clean up afterwards. All of this work gives the appearance of servitude to the teachers and masters.

The reverse actually holds more truth. The masters are serving the apprentices with something much greater.

The apprentices work is not to do the job of form, or task at hand. Their real work is the inner work of becoming humble, of releasing their self-importance. It is through performing these tasks that the apprentices have the opportunity to face their own selfishness.

It is not the service to the master that is bringing them closer to heaven. It is the destruction of their self-importance that is taking them there. In letting go of their own personal point of view, they have the opportunity to grasp something greater. Initially the apprentice’s view may be one of resentment. He may think he is above doing the laundry. He may resent his teacher for having to make his meals. These acts of service allow the apprentice to see all the places that he is selfish. When the apprentice has healed himself of selfishness, he can begin to serve selflessly.

The master serves the apprentice by tasking him with chores so that the apprentice can deal with his own selfishness. Helping to free the apprentice from his selfishness is a far greater service than scrubbing floors.

It is through practicing service with the intent that our self-importance be diminished that we progress to selfless service. Selfless service is action without any expectation or want of recognition or reward. It is through practicing selfless service that we come to grace. It is through grace, that we will enter Heaven on earth.

You do not need to travel far to find a place to practice. You can be in service to your spouse. You can be in service to your boss. You can be in service to other drivers as you commute to work. A true master is in service all the time. The people you are in service to do not need to know. If you find that you want to be recognized for what you have done, you are dealing with your own selfishness.

If you have a need to tell them, it is only because your self-importance wants to be recognized. When the urge for this appears, acknowledge it, but do your best not to act on it.

The truth is that your service is not really for anyone else. Your works are to diminish you own personal importance. The world will benefit a small amount from your works. You will benefit a thousand fold if your works bring you to grace and into a life of heaven on earth.