Don Miguel Ruiz: The Toltec Art of Life and Death
It’s important to understand that we now see the core of the problem, and the problem is that we learn to love exactly the same way everybody else loves —the way our parents love, the way our own friends love. We love with conditions – I love you if you let me control you. If I can control you, and you obey, then everything will be perfect. If you speak the language, I speak, think the way I like you to think, dress the way I like you to dress, everything will be fine, and we can always be happy. This is how we love everybody, but everybody also loves us in that same way. They love us if they can control us. If we become what they want us to become, then they love us, and otherwise, they will reject us.
Wherever we go, we see the interaction between people and how they love each other. They love each other with conditions. The real problem with this is that we learn to love ourselves in exactly the same way — we love ourselves with conditions. We have to be the way we wish to be, to accept ourselves. This is how we create all those intentions, all the fear, and all the anger. We can now learn that when we operate from the truth, all the superstitions are falling apart — when Lala completely surrendered, there were no more superstitions, and Lala went into truth, into life.
OMTimes: During a conversation you had with your grandfather don Leonardo, you write that your self-confidence was shattered because he explained to you that you had been constructing the world based on the faith in your opinions and the rumors that you heard. You believed in an image of yourself based on the many things that aren’t true. How can we better learn to understand, without a doubt, who we truly are?
Don Miguel Ruiz: We can see that this is a wonderful example. I went to my grandfather with all my superstitions, and I tried to defend all of my own opinions. But I learned that these were not my own opinions. These were options I learned from somebody else. I was repeating the superstitions and even defending them, until my grandfather, just listened with a smile. That was enough for me to understand that he did not believe anything of what I shared with him. This really happened with my grandfather, but it’s also good to know that my grandfather is an extension of me.
I can see, that just having this conversation with him, broke a lot of my superstitions, and I realized that the only way to keep talking with him, was to be completely authentic. The humiliation, the shame, and the guilt happened because all of those superstitions were falling apart. Because they couldn’t survive the presence of the truth. It was a great lesson that I received from him.
