Common Sense Wisdom Based in the Four Agreements
Believing is something that you do.
Faith is what you do it with.
Faith is a kind of personal power you have. You can put it in concepts and ideas in your head and make agreements with it. Or you can put your personal power of faith within your self.
A warrior refrains from the first, and does the latter.
Love is a great change agent. When you are exposed to, and experience great love, your life has a tremendous chance to change. In the experience of love your unhappiness from a limited perspective, and beliefs in fear and lies can not survive.
One of the challenges is that when you exposed to love, your ego will fight back. It will try to deny, diminish, and distract you from what you feel. Such is the nature of stories in the mind. They don’t feed well on unconditional love and fear starving to death.
Love and Fear,,,, this is the battle ground within for the Spiritual Warrior. It is a battle over one’s attention. On one side is Love and all the expressions of Love. On the other, is fear, and all the expressions of fear.
Self awareness is a necessary trait of a warrior. Being aware of his expressions is how he recognizes which side he is on in each moment.
for practical steps and exercises on finding your way try the free sessions of the Self Mastery program.
We don’t learn to control our attention when we are young. We have to learn to control our attention when we are adults.
When we are young we were told where to put our attention, who to put it on, and how long to keep it there. We learned to put our attention on what other people told us to. Since adults taught us to put our attention on them, or on what they wanted to put our attention on, (school work, chores, minding our manners, following the rules, etc) by default we learned not to put our attention on our self. We became automated to have others control our attention.
Indirectly we learned not to pay attention to our emotions, what we were feeling, or what we wanted.
When you become an adult, and you realize that your attention is still governed by all those rules you collected, or that your mind is looking for other people to direct your attention. You might even feel uncomfortable if it is your own hands with no one telling you what to do. You may find your self trapped with your thoughts and beliefs controlling your attention. Realizing that you are trapped, and don’t have control over your attention is one of the first steps towards freedom.
It is only as adults that we have the opportunity to take control over our own attention, notice how we feel, and direct our life in a way we want. This is something of an opportunity not typically available to us when we were children.
Oh,,, and it will take work, and many attempts to free your attention from limiting beliefs and fears.
Such is a spiritual warriors training ground.
Specific exercises for gaining control over your own attention can be found at my Self Mastery Course at Pathway to Happiness.
I used to think I had things under control. That is I believed I “knew” what was going on. As I became more aware I realized that everything that I knew was just information that I had learned from other people. I had unknowingly agreed with the ideas of other people about how the world worked, how people behaved, even what I was and what I wasn’t.
My next wave or realizations involved learning that what I knew wasn’t true. This was humbling. It was also unsettling to realize that what I thought of the world and other people wasn’t true. It was somewhat fearful to realize that the authorities that I looked to for direction and understanding of my world,,, didn’t always know what they were talking about.
Teachers didn’t know everything there was to know about life. Professors of physics couldn’t explain why any particles were here, or what was the force driving the ones they could see. Wake up in your adult years and learn that there may not be such a thing as gravity. Clergy weren’t always living a life of respect, love, and happiness so how could they guide others.
As I became more aware I noticed that more and more of the ideas in my own head weren’t true. I had less to say because of this.
There was temptations to grab hold of a theology or philosophy for safety and claim it is what I believe in. It will guide me. But something within was holding out for Truth.
In the process of letting go of what I believed I knew that I knew less. Over time I moved through the uncomfortable emotions that arise as we dissolve the chatter of internal dialog in the mind. Embracing humility was liberating me from my Self Importance (ego). There was freedom in not knowing. What was a fearful process was becoming a quiet and peaceful mind.
For the spiritual warrior one of the challenges is to control the knowledge that is in their mind. For ordinary men and women this doesn’t mean anything. That is because knowledge and ideas run around in their mind uncontrolled and they don’t even notice.
This post on Having Things In Your Mind Under Control originally posted at:
https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/07/under-control/
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.
I don’t buy into the Law of Attraction. You don’t always attract what is in your consciousness. You only need one instance to prove a law invalid. Christ had his body beaten and crucified but it wasn’t something he attracted because he had it in his consciousness. He was treated that way because of beliefs other people held in their consciousness
Nelson Mandela spent years confined to prison, but not because it reflected his consciousness. He was held in prison because other people held in their consciousness beliefs of apartheid. You don’t always attract what is in your consciousness. Sometimes you are the recipient of what other people express from their belief system.
If something is a law it operates all the time everywhere. The law of gravity is a law because it applies to everything we know everywhere we can measure and test it. If it only worked sometimes or in some places it wouldn’t be a law. The same with the Law of Attraction. It’s too inconsistent. It’s only a theory that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s not a “Law.” It’s a Myth of Attraction. If it really worked a lot more people would have what the want.
Originally posted at The Law of Attraction is a Myth
Where you can find Guidance and Wisdom for the Spiritual Warrior based in the Four Agreements
The challenge is not to free your mind.
The challenge is to free your self from your mind.
This post by Gary van Warmerdam at https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/02/free-your-mind/
Where you can find Wisdom of the Four Agreements for Spiritual Warriors
For practical steps and exercises to inventory and change your own beliefs/agreements there are exercises in the Self Mastery course.
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.
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/
Sometimes you will hear people say, “Nobody is Perfect.”
Generally they include themselves in this category of not being perfect.
It’s an odd kind of self judgment.
It’s an odd kind of self judgment based on this idea of perfection. However, there’s nobody in this category of “Perfection.” And if perfection is an empty group then “perfection” doesn’t really exist.
The consequences of that is that “imperfection” doesn’t exist. Then there is no one that is imperfect either. Including you.
Saying that you aren’t perfect is like saying that Tuesday is not tall enough. “Not tall enough” does’t exist as a category for Tuesdays. Then the category “Too Tall” doesn’t exist eigher. The categories don’t apply.
So applying the category descriptions of “perfect” and “imperfect” to your self, and other people, doesn’t make much sense.
This post originally published at www.ToltecSpirit.com a blog about the Four Agreements.
For practical exercises in being Impeccable and Not Taking things personally listen to the audio sessions in the Self Mastery program.