don Miguel Ruiz: The Actor

don Miguel Ruiz is a renowned spiritual teacher and internationally bestselling author. He has spent the past three decades guiding people to personal freedom through his profound insights regarding the nature of human reality.

An Interview with don Miguel Ruiz: The Actor

The youngest of thirteen children, don Miguel Ruiz was born in rural Mexico to parents who were healers and practitioners of ancient Toltec traditions. As a young adult, he graduated from medical school in Mexico City and practiced neurosurgery with his older brother in Tijuana. A near-fatal car crash forever changed the direction of his life, however, causing him to leave medicine and to examine the essential truth about life and humanity. With his mother’s help, and through her ancestral teachings, he discovered his own path to awareness, which evolved into a deep understanding of the physical universe and the virtual world of the mind.

Combining Toltec mythology and scientific perspectives, don Miguel has been able to merge ancient wisdom with modern physics and practical common sense, forging a new philosophy for seekers of truth and personal authenticity. His landmark bestselling book, The Four Agreements, contains practical steps for long-term, personal transformation and has been read by millions around the world.

Sandra Sedgbeer sat down with don Miguel to talk about his new book, “The Actor” available now, everywhere.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Don Miguel, Oscar Wilde wrote that “most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives are mimicry, their passions a quotation.” In your newest book, The Actor, you write that performance art is a way of life for all of us with the main character in every story we were told about our lives, and yet we are, in large part, a knock-off of the people who raised us.

Playing the roles people expect us to play and reciting a script learned from childhood. However, our loyalty to the character we’re playing keeps us from realizing our authenticity as human beings. So, why are “other people?”

don Miguel Ruiz: We are all the same. The word “Toltec,” which comes from the Nagual, means “artist.” Toltec knowledge is the artist’s knowledge, and in my view, every human is an artist and is going in all the different directions of art. The main one, which comes from our DNA, is “acting” because we act all the time—even if we have no awareness.

This is prepared for us before our birth. Our parents are prepared to receive us, care for us, worry for us, and share everything they know. They give all their knowledge to us and use that knowledge to create the most wonderful, powerful creation, which is our life story. And in that story, we are the main actor or actresses. And everybody else is a secondary actor.

The most important thing they teach us is the language that we speak. That’s why I always say that the integrity of the word is so important because the kind of life we have depends on how we use the word and the type of story we create. Then we write the screenplay with much help, of course, our life and the universe in which we live. The stage of our life is, of course, shifting and changing all the time.

It’s beautiful to see the evolution of the human.

We are all the same, but the characteristics are slightly different, number one, and the language we speak. We follow those rules and believe everything we learn, not just from our parents, but from our school and the society in which we live. it is true we are acting all the time, with every action and reaction we are performing, even if we do not know we are performing. And we continue to perform as we grow up, and little by little, we lose our authenticity.

And we begin to feel something is missing. We no longer know who we were. Many times we don’t like the way we behave. We criticize ourselves for not doing something following what we believe. The script is shifting and changing all the time according to the many challenges we face. You know we are facing all the mysteries of life because everything is a mystery, really.

Sandra Sedgbeer: You say that planet Earth is our mystery school, and the mystery we are looking to solve in life is ourselves; that more than anything, we want to know who we are. And yet, this is the very question we’re most afraid to ask. Why are we so afraid to ask this question?

The Actor_don miguel Ruiz-Omtimes — Click to purchase!

don Miguel Ruiz: Because we’re so afraid of the unknown. We know what we believe we are–and what we believe we are is the result of everybody’s opinion, including our own opinion because everybody pretends to know us.

Our father and mother say, “I know my son very well.” Our brothers and sisters say the same thing. And we believe we know them well too. But it is not true; we only know what we believe they are and what we believe we are. Also, we only know how we wish to be, the way we want to perform in front of everybody to conform with the image they––and we––have created us. We have to behave in a certain way to be accepted by them, to please them.

We change our behavior according to what they want us to be, and we sacrifice ourselves and lose our authenticity by doing what they want us to do. And we don’t even notice it. This is the big mystery that we are all searching to understand. We call it searching for God or searching for “the truth.”

Sandra Sedgbeer: So, how do we reclaim our authenticity?

don Miguel Ruiz: Well, the first step is just to be aware…that I am an actor, and I’ve been acting all of my life even if I didn’t fully know that… the way I behave with my family is different from the way I behave at school or work, or in other activities I perform.

We also have to realize that everybody around us is also acting all the time, and they don’t know it. When we understand this, the opinions and the beliefs they have about us start losing their power over us. The more we stop believing them, the more we stop sacrificing ourselves, and the more we recover our own authenticity. The less we need to satisfy other’s expectations of us and start doing what we really love to do, the happier we become and the more we feel at peace.

Sandra Sedgbeer: If we’ve been conditioned since babyhood, do you think we can actually know when we are truly authentic? How will we know? You said we’d be happier…what else might we discover?

don Miguel Ruiz: We all feel the results of what we do. For every action, there is a reaction. When we force ourselves to do something that we don’t like, that goes against something within us, we don’t feel. When we do what we love to do, we enjoy every moment. We have fun.

When we were children, we played being somebody else¬ with other children––pretending to be a doctor or a nurse.

Sometimes, when we’re pretending, our faces change, our personalities change, we become serious. And when the game was over, we would smile and laugh. We never really stop being children. We are still playing one role or another. Sometimes we don’t enjoy what we are playing, sometimes we do.

Debra Silverman: The Missing Element

But we keep on acting and acting and acting. And the scenery is shifting and changing all the time, and we adapt and change with it. We are used to being a certain way, and for whatever reason, something traumatic happens, and everything shifts right away.

The pandemic came a year ago, and the entire planet changed, and everybody started adapting to whatever circumstances and whatever place they live in. We have seen many people die. We can see how we, in one way or another, adapt to survive. It is interesting to see how people immediately come together to face whatever challenge life brings to us when something tragic happens in nature.

Sandra Sedgbeer: Yes, it is. One of the other things about the pandemic is that many people have started to reevaluate what they’re doing. They’ve learned a lot more about themselves and about others than they thought they knew. Have you found that people are responding to the pandemic by becoming more authentic?

don Miguel Ruiz: Well, what they first see is that change can happen very fast. We cannot take for granted that life is the way it’s always been, and we become more authentic because we have to set new priorities. If we take Covid, we see that survival is our first priority, and we adapt to that.

Our second priority is the people that live with us, our beloveds, our children, brothers, and sisters. The other priorities that follow are what we do for a living because that provides what is needed first for the body and for the people we care for and protect. And then, we see other kinds of priorities that shift individuals depending on the society they live in.

Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with don Miguel Ruiz