30. The Mastery of Love - Don Miguel Ruiz (📱)
27 Jun 2017
Rating 9/10
Reading Notes:
When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world.
Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go.
The happiest moments in our lives are when we are playing just like children, when we are singing and dancing, when we are exploring and creating just for fun.
That is why we seek recognition from other people; we need emotional support from other people; we need to be accepted by the outside Dream, via other people.
Little by little we lose our innocence; we start to feel resentment, then we no longer forgive. Over time, these incidents and interactions let us know it’s not safe to be who we really are. Of course this will vary in intensity with each human according to his intelligence and his education. It will depend on many things. If you-are lucky, the domestication is not that strong. But if you are not so lucky, the domestication can be so strong and the wounds so deep, that you can even be afraid to speak. The result is, “Oh, I am shy.” Shyness is the fear of expressing yourself.
The limit of your self-abuse is the limit you will tolerate from other people.
Life brings to you exactly what you need. There is perfect justice in hell. There is nothing to blame. We can even say that our suffering is a gift. If you just open your eyes and see what is around you, it’s exactly what you need to clean your poison, to heal your wounds, to accept yourself, and to get out of hell.
That is the mistake most of us make right from the beginning. We base our happiness on our partner, and it doesn’t work that way. We make all those promises that we cannot keep, and we set ourselves up to fail.
Just as your body is made by cells, your dreams are made by emotions. There are two main sources of those emotions: One is fear, and all the emotions that come from fear; the other is love, and all the emotions that come from love. Love has no obligations. Fear is full of obligations. In the track of fear, whatever we do is because we have to do it, and we expect other people to do something because they have to do it.
On the other hand, love has no resistance. Whatever we do is because we want to do it. It becomes a pleasure; it’s like a game, and we have fun with it.
Love has no expectations. Fear is full of expectations. With fear we do things because we expect that we have to, and we expect that others are going to do the same. That is why fear hurts and love doesn’t hurt. We expect something and if it doesn’t happen, we feel hurt – it isn’t fair. We blame others for not fulfilling our expectations. When we love, we don’t have expectations; we do it because we want to, and if other people do it or not, it’s because they want to or not and it’s nothing personal.
You are not going to change a dog for a cat or a dog for a horse; it is what it is.
Just accepting this fact in your relations with other humans is very important. You cannot change other people. You love them the way they are or you don’t. You accept them the way they are or you don’t.
The dog doesn’t try to make you be a good human, a good master. Then why can’t we allow a woman to be a woman or a man to be a man and love that human just the way he or she is without trying to change that person?
if someone wants to change you, it means you are not what that person wants.
You need to be honest with yourself, and honest with everyone else. Project what you feel you really are, and don’t pretend to be what you are not.
When we go into a relationship, we become selfish because we are needy. It’s all about me. We are so selfish that we want the person with whom we are sharing our life to be as needy as we are. We want “someone who needs me” in order to justify our existence, in order to feel that we have a reason to be alive. We think we are searching for love, but we are searching for someone who needs me, someone we can control and manipulate.
You have to focus on the most wonderful relationship you can have: the relationship with yourself. It is not about being selfish; it is about self-love. These are not the same.
People learn to become selfish and to close their hearts so tightly. They are starving for love, not knowing that the heart is a magical kitchen. Your heart is a magical kitchen. Open your heart. Open your magical kitchen, and refuse to walk around the world begging for love. In your heart is all the love you need. Your heart can create any amount of love, not just for yourself, but for the whole world. You can give your love with no conditions; you can be generous with your love because you have a magical kitchen in your heart. Then all those starving people who believe the heart is closed will always want to be near you for your love.
What makes you happy is love coming out of you. And if you are generous with your love, everyone is going to love you. You are never going to be alone if you are generous. If you are selfish, you are always going to be alone, and there is no one to blame but you. Your generosity will open all the doors, not your selfishness.
Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant. We become selfish when we believe that maybe tomorrow we won’t have any pizza. But when we know that our heart is a magical kitchen, we are always generous, and our love is completely unconditional.
You have to stalk your own reactions; you have to work with yourself every moment. It takes a lot of time and courage, because it’s easier to take things personally and react the way you always react. And that leads you to a lot of mistakes, to a lot of suffering and pain, because your reactions only generate more emotional poison and increase the drama.
Once we have the awareness, we recover free will. When we recover free will, in any moment we can choose to remember who we are. Then, if we forget, we can choose again, if we have the awareness. But if we don’t have the awareness, we have no choice.
The real mission you have in life is to make yourself happy, and in order to be happy, you have to look at what you believe, the way you judge yourself, the way you victimize yourself.
“There is no worse blind man than the one who doesn’t want to see. There is no worse deaf man than the one who doesn’t want to hear. And there is no worse madman than the one who doesn’t want to understand.”
Everyone has a price, and Life respects that price. But that price is not measured in dollars or in gold; it is measured in love. More than that, it is measured in self-love. How much you love yourself – that is your price – and Life respects the price. When you love yourself, your price is very high, which means your tolerance for self-abuse is very low. It’s very low because you respect yourself. You like yourself the way you are, and this makes your price higher. If you don’t like things about yourself, the price is a little lower.
The hunting of the magical deer teaches you that you have to hunt inside yourself. This is, a great story to keep in mind. If you remember the story of Artemis, you will always find the love inside you. Humans who hunt each other for love will never be satisfied; they will never find the love they need in other humans. The mind feels the need, but we cannot fulfill it, because it isn’t there. It’s never there.
The love we need to hunt is inside ourselves, but that love is difficult prey. It is so difficult to hunt inside yourself, to get that love from inside you. You have to be very fast, as fast as Hermes, because anything can distract you from your goal. Whatever traps your attention distracts you from reaching your goal, from getting the prey that is the love inside. If you can capture the prey, you will see that your love can grow strong inside you, and it can fulfill all your needs. This is so important for your happiness.
To hunt inside yourself, you start by hunting every reaction you have. You are going to change one routine at a time. It is a war for freedom from the Dream that controls your life.
The whole forest is your body, and if you just acknowledge this truth, you will say to your body, “I am sorry; now I will take care of you again.” The relationship between you and your body, between you and all those living cells that depend on you, can become the most beautiful relationship.
The other half is your mind. Your body takes care of its half of the relationship, but the mind is the one that abuses the body, that mistreats the body, that gets so mean with the body.
We reject our own body when the body is completely loyal to us. Even when our body can’t do something because of its limitations, we push our body and our body at least tries.
Look at what you do with your own body. If you reject your own body, what can other people expect from you? If you accept your own body, you can accept almost everyone, almost everything.
The relationship you have with yourself is reflected in your relationships with others. If you reject your own body, when you are sharing your love with your partner, you become shy. You think, “Look at my body. How can he love me when I have a body like this?” Then you reject yourself and make the assumption that the other person will reject you for the same thing you reject in yourself. And when you reject someone else, you reject him for the same things you reject in yourself.
What is important are not all those opinions from others, but your own opinions.
Beauty is nothing but a concept, nothing but a belief, but you can believe in that concept of beauty, and base all your power on that beauty.
You are what you believe you are. There is nothing to do except to be just what you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it. You can honor your body and accept it as it is. You don’t need anyone to love you. Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it. You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.
To heal the emotional body, we are going to do the same thing. We need to open the wounds and clean the wounds, use some medicine, and keep the wounds clean until they heal.
We are going to use the truth as a scalpel to open the wounds.
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
The truth is like a scalpel because it is painful to open our wounds and uncover all of the lies. The wounds in our emotional body are covered by the denial system, the system of lies we have created to protect those wounds.
You begin by practicing the truth with yourself. When you are truthful with yourself, you start to see everything as it is, not the way you want to see it.
The truth is relative in this world; it’s changing all the time because we live in a world of illusions. What is true right now is not true later. Then it could be true again.
Take your pride and put it in the trash. You don’t need it. Just let go of the personal importance and ask for forgiveness. Forgive others, and you will see miracles start to happen in your life.
When you become wise, life becomes easy, because you become who you really are. It’s difficult to try to be what you are not, to try to convince yourself and everyone else that you are what you are not.
Being what you are doesn’t require any effort.
When you become wise, you don’t have to use all those images you created; you don’t have to pretend to be something else. You accept yourself the way you are, and the complete acceptance of yourself becomes the complete acceptance of everyone else. You no longer try to change other people or impose your point of view. You respect other people’s beliefs. You accept your body and your own humanity with all the instincts of your body.
When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head. You no longer sabotage yourself, your own happiness, or your own love. You no longer carry all that guilt and blame; you no longer have all those judgments against yourself, and you no longer judge anyone else. From that moment on, all the beliefs that make you unhappy, that push you to struggle in life, that make your life difficult, just vanish.
When you surrender to the real you, you surrender to Life, you surrender to God. Once you surrender, there is no longer a struggle, there is no resistance, there is no suffering.
When you no longer have those wounds in the emotional body, the boundaries disappear, and you start to see everything as it is, not according to your belief system.