New Agreements for Living: Interview with Don Miguel Ruiz Jr
SS: How did your book come into being? What inspired you to write it?
MRJ: In the beginning I had an attachment to the outcome of a book but as I started writing, something else came up that I wanted to say, so towards the end it wasn’t about the end result, it was about that I have something to say and that’s why I wanted to write the book and finish it. It was a fun process. I was once sitting down in an interview with my dad and someone asked what the difference was between him writing The Four Agreements and me writing The Five Levels of Attachment and my father answered: “Well, the main thing is that when I wrote The Four Agreements I had already gone through that process long before and when my son wrote The Five Levels of Attachment he was actually going through the process and learning that as he wrote the book. So it took four years to write because he was processing everything and learning everything he was writing”. I think the book captures that process.
SS: You say the mind’s main job is to ‘dream’, what does that mean?
MRJ: In our tradition ‘to dream’ means to perceive and to project. I perceive information continuously and I project information continuously. My senses, my hearing, my sight, the nerves that finish at every point of my body allow me to perceive information 360 degrees around me and it all goes to one point of perception. You can say it’s my brain, it’s my heart, wherever it may be, it is all going to this one point of perception. And from there I am able to project. So you can say that the first objective of dreaming is understanding that I am perceiving that I am awake. [he now moves his fingers freely in front of the camera and knocks his fingers on a hard object]. Time is also linear. When I am asleep and I am dreaming this object doesn’t exist and I can put my fingers right through it. Whether I am asleep or awake I am perceiving it and I am the constant point between the two forms of perception, you can say ‘dreaming’. Sometimes when I am awake I can also daydream. I can be speaking to you right now but I can also let my imagination think what my son is currently doing and totally visualize that, even while speaking to you, which means that I am perceiving you in this material frame yet I am still able to use my imagination to daydream what is happening over there. The truth is I am still that point of perception that allows me to perceive and my reason is the compass. My reason allows me to tell the difference between something that is real and my imagination or when I am asleep. When I wake up I can tell the difference between what I perceived when I was asleep and the dream I had when I was awake. So from that point of view I describe the individual dream.
