Don Miguel Ruiz: The Toltec Art of Life and Death
OMTimes: This is another story that I love so much. You describe a scene around the dinner table with the entire family, and suddenly you noticed how everyone was completely absorbed by their seemingly random emotions and how the emotions could suddenly come and go, without obvious reasons. It seems, even though we might begin to understand who we truly are, that the body is still so addicted to this kind of emotions. What’s the path to follow here?
Barbara Emrys: The body follows the narrative. It’s a very good servant to our thought process and our belief system. Rather than think “what do we do with this body that’s leading us to all these conflicting emotions”, let’s think about the thought process and the belief system that drives it to respond chemically and emotionally in certain ways. We don’t take enough time to listen to what we’re thinking and what we’re believing.
This is the example Don Miguel Ruiz was just talking about, of having this encounter with truth with his grandfather, without really any words or judgments. It was just: “Do you listen to yourself? Where do these ideas come from?” What Miguel is calling superstition, may not be what the rest of us call superstition. We need to look more closely because I believe that what has control over you, affects and persuades you to construct your reality in certain ways, is a superstition that you give all the power to. It may be very small, and it may be very subtle, but you have given it power over your thoughts and your behavior. So a well-meaning grandson comes to his grandfather and says: “This is what I know.” And the grandfather says: “This is not who you are.” You are something other than your knowledge. This is of course borrowed knowledge at best, so that’s a little jolt of truth. You are not the sum of your opinions or your beliefs, and what are you going to do with that? I am going to stop believing myself, and I am going to start seeing myself as life, like this force that moves matter and also creates the ability to think and believe. This, of course, expands our awareness into an idea of ourselves which is eternal. Everything that is not eternal is temporal, something familiar, but it doesn’t really speak to the truth of us.
