People domesticated in similar way as pets.
When a dog “misbehaves”, most people discourage it in some way from behaving the same way again. When a child misbehaves, we let the child know we don’t approve. That’s how we condition children to subscribe to our view of the world, and cause them to be domesticated.
In The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel Ruiz tells us:
As children, we didn’t have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet via other humans. The only way to store information is by agreement.
We agreed to accept other people’s beliefs about the world, and those beliefs, because we agreed with them, became ours. We got into the habit of pleasing others, because we were approved of when we complied with the accepted standards of the society.
It felt good to be approved of and to get the attention of others, so we started changing ourselves into beings we not, just to get more of this approval and attention. We started living by the beliefs of others we agreed with, and they made an internal map in us. It became our inner book of laws, which felt safe, although it was flawed.
According to Don Miguel Ruiz, whenever we try to act in disagreement with these internal laws, we start feeling fear. And this fear discourages most to continue with such a line of action. And so people live in the prison they created within, which is made of all the beliefs of others that they accepted.
Because we created this inner prison, we think that the way out of it is by looking for external help, in the form of beauty or goodness. All these good things already ours and within, but we’re blind to that because our personal beliefs prevent us from seeing what’s within. We trust that our beliefs real, and this makes us suffer.
These beliefs described in The Four Agreements book as fog, a dream, illusion that prevents us from really seeing.
Our biggest fear is not death, according to The Four Agreements’ author, but being truly alive and expressing who we really . We fear of being not accepted by people and we fear of being not good enough.
Trying to be accepted we create an image of perfection in our minds of how we be. The problem is, this image of perfection is not real, and what’s worse, we reject ourselves because we don’t live up to it. As Don Miguel Ruiz puts it:
We know we not what we believe we supposed to be and so we feel false, frustrated, and dishonest. We try to hide ourselves, and we pretend to be what we not. The result is that we feel unauthentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We so afraid that somebody else will notice that we not what we pretend to be.
Because we wish to be in a certain way but we not, we start feeling ashamed of ourselves and guilty. We find ways to punish ourselves for that. Here’s a good indicator to discover your level of self-abuse, according to Dong Miguel Ruiz:
…the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less that you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.
Most powerful agreements you make not with others but with your own self. The agreements you make with yourself determine who you , what you feel, what you believe and how you behave. They determine what you believe to be possible and impossible for you to achieve.
To live a joyful life, you need to find all fear-based agreements and break them. Lots of personal power is used up to keep fear-based personal agreements. Some people have so many fear-based personal agreements that they feel utterly powerless to make changes.
To change your life, you need to change the agreements you made with yourself. The four agreements described in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom will help to break fear-based agreements within to release personal power and start making real changes.
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