You may have never thought about this issue, but to a greater or lesser extent, we are all teachers. We are teachers because we have the power to create and direct our own lives.
In the same way that different societies and religions around the world have created an incredible mythology, we create ours. Our personal mythology is populated by heroes and villains, angels and demons, kings and commoners. We create an entire population in our mind and include multiple personalities for ourselves. Then, we acquire mastery over the image that we will use in certain circumstances. We become artists of pretense and projection of our image and masters of anything we think we are. When we meet other people, we classify them immediately according to what we think they are. And we act in the same way with all the people and things that surround us.
You have the power to create. Your power is so strong that whatever you decide to believe becomes reality. You believe yourself, whatever you think you are. You are as you are because that is what you believe about yourself. All your reality, everything you believe, is the fruit of your own creation. You have the same power as any other human being in the world. The main difference between another person and you lies in the way you apply your power and what you believe with him. You may look like other people in many things, but not everyone lives life the same way you do.
You have practiced all your life to be who you are and you do it so well that you have become a teacher of what you think you are. You are a teacher of your own personality and your own beliefs; You master every action and every reaction. You practice for years and years until you reach the level of expertise to be what you think you are. And when we finally understand that all of us are teachers, we get to see what kind of expertise we have.
When a child has a problem with someone, and gets angry, for whatever reason, anger makes the problem go away and in this way he gets the result he wanted. Then, it happens again, and reacts with anger, because now he knows that if he gets angry, the problem will disappear. Well, then practice and practice until you become a master of anger.
Well, this is how we become jealous teachers, teachers of sadness or teachers of self-rejection.
All our misery and our suffering have their origin in practice. We establish an agreement with ourselves and practice it until it becomes a complete master's degree. The way we think, the way we feel and the way we act becomes so routine that we stop paying attention to what we do. We behave in a certain way just because we are used to acting and reacting like that.
But to become masters of love we have to practice love. The art of relationships is also a complete mastery and the only way to achieve it is through practice. Therefore, to become a teacher in a relationship you have to act. It is not about acquiring certain concepts or reaching specific knowledge. It is a matter of action. Now, obviously, to act it is necessary to have some knowledge or at least a greater awareness of the way in which human beings function.
I want you to imagine that you live on a planet where all people suffer from a skin disease. For two thousand or three thousand years, the people of this planet have suffered the same disease: their whole body is covered with infected wounds, which when touched, really hurt. Obviously, people believe that this is the normal physiology of the skin. Even medical books describe such a disease as the normal state. At birth, the skin is healthy, but at three or four years of age, the first wounds begin to appear and in adolescence, they cover the entire body.
Can you imagine how those people are treated? To relate to each other they have to protect their wounds. They almost never touch each other's skin because it is too painful, and if, by accident, you touch someone's skin, the pain is so intense that they immediately get mad at you and it is your turn, just to getting even. Even so, the instinct of love is so strong that on that planet a high price is paid to have relationships with other people.
Well, imagine that one day a miracle happens. You wake up and your skin is completely healed. You no longer have any injuries and it doesn't hurt when they touch you. Touching healthy skin feels wonderful because the skin is made for perception. Can you imagine yourself with healthy skin in a world in which all people have a skin disease? You can't touch others because it hurts and nobody touches you because they think it will hurt.
If you are able to imagine this, you can understand that if someone from another planet came to visit us they would have a similar experience with human beings. But it is not our skin that is full of wounds.
What the visitor will discover is that the human mind suffers from a disease called fear. Like the infected skin of the inhabitants of that imaginary planet, our emotional body is full of wounds, of wounds infected by emotional poison. The disease of fear manifests itself through anger, hatred, sadness, envy and hypocrisy, and the result of this disease is all the emotions that cause the suffering of the human being.
All human beings suffer from the same mental illness.
We could even say that this world is a mental hospital. However, this mental illness has been in the world for thousands of years. The books of medicine, psychiatry and psychology describe it as a normal state. They consider it normal, but I tell you that it is not.
When the fear becomes too intense, the rational mind begins to fail and is no longer able to withstand all those wounds full of poison. Psychology books call this phenomenon mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but the truth is that these diseases appear when the rational mind is so scared and the wounds hurt so much, that it is preferable to break contact with the outside world.
Human beings live with the continuous fear of being hurt and this gives rise to great conflicts wherever we go. The way we interact with each other causes so much emotional pain that, for no apparent reason, we get angry and feel jealous, envious or sad. Even saying 'I love you' can be scary.
But, although maintaining an emotional interaction causes us pain and frightened us, we continue to do so, we continue to start a relationship, getting married and having children.
Due to the fear that human beings have to be hurt and in order to protect our emotional wounds, we create something very sophisticated in our mind: a great system of denial. In that system of denial we become perfect liars. We lie so well that we lie to ourselves and even believe our own lies.
We do not realize that we are lying, and sometimes, even when we know that we lie, we justify the lie and excuse it to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.
The denial system is like a wall of fog in front of our eyes that blinds us and prevents us from seeing the truth. We wear a social mask because it is too painful to see ourselves or allow others to see us as we really are. The denial system allows us to pretend that all people believe what we want them to believe in us. And although we place these barriers to protect and keep people away, they also keep us locked up and restrict our freedom. Humans take shelter and protect themselves and when someone says, "You're messing with me, " it's not exactly true. What is certain is that you are touching one of his mental wounds and he reacts because it hurts.
When you become aware that all the people around you have wounds full of emotional poison, you begin to understand the relationships of human beings in what the Toltecs call the dream of hell. From the Toltec perspective, everything we believe about us and everything we know about our world is a dream. If you examine any religious description of hell you realize that it does not differ from the society of human beings, the way we dream. Hell is a place where you suffer, where you fear, where there are wars and violence, where you judge and there is no justice, a place of infinite punishment. Some human beings act against other human beings in a jungle of predators; human beings full of judgments, full of reproaches, full of guilt, full of emotional poison: envy, anger, hate, sadness, suffering. And we create all these little demons in our minds because we have learned to dream hell in our own lives.
All of us created our own personal dream, but the human beings that preceded us created a great external dream, the dream of human society. The external Dream, or the Dream of the Planet, is the collective Dream of billions of dreamers. The great Dream includes all the norms of society, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and its different ways of being. All this information stored within our mind is like a thousand voices that speak to us at the same time. This is what the Toltecs call the mitote.
But what we really are is pure love; We are life. And what we really are has nothing to do with the dream, but the mitote prevents us from seeing it. When you contemplate the dream from this perspective, and become aware of who you are, you understand how absurd the behavior of human beings is, and then, it becomes something fun. What seems like a great drama to everyone else is a comedy. You see how human beings suffer for something that is unimportant, something that is not even real.
But we have no other option. We are born in this society, we grow in this society and learn to be like everyone else, acting and competing continuously in an absurd way.
Now, imagine for a moment that you could visit a planet where all people had a different emotional mind. The way they would relate to each other would always be happy, always loving, always peaceful. Now imagine that one day you wake up on that planet and that you no longer have wounds in your emotional body. You are no longer afraid of being who you are. You no longer care what people say about you, because you don't take it personally and it has stopped causing you pain. So you don't need to protect yourself anymore. You are not afraid to love, to share, to open your heart. Now this has only happened to you. How will you relate to people who suffer from emotional wounds and who are sick with fear?
When a human being is born, his mind and emotional body are completely healthy. Perhaps by the third or fourth year of age the first wounds begin to appear on the emotional body and become infected with emotional poison. But, if you look at the children of two or three years and look at their behavior, you will see that they are always playing. You will see them laugh without stopping. His imagination is very powerful and his way of dreaming an authentic exploration adventure.
When something goes wrong they react and defend themselves, but then they simply forget and return their attention to the present moment to continue playing, exploring and having fun. They live the moment. They are not ashamed of the past and do not care about the future. Young children express what they feel and are not afraid to love.
That is why the happiest moments of our life are those in which we play as if we were children, when we sing and dance, when we explore and create with the sole purpose of having fun.
When we behave like children we find it wonderful because that is the normal state of the human mind, the natural tendency.
We are innocent, just like children, and it is normal for us to express love. But what has happened to us? What has happened to the whole world?
What has happened is that, when we were young, adults already suffered from this mental illness, a highly contagious disease. And how did they transmit it to us? Capturing our attention and teaching us to be like them. This is how we transfer our illness to our children and this is how our parents, our teachers, our older brothers and a whole society of sick people infected us. They caught our attention, and, through repetition, filled our minds with information. In this way we learned, and in this way we programmed a human mind.
The problem lies in the program, in the information that we have stored in our mind. Once the attention of the children is captured, we teach them a language, we teach them to read, to behave and to dream in a certain way. We domesticate human beings in the same way that we domesticate a dog or any other animal: with punishments and rewards. This is perfectly normal. What we call education is nothing other than the domestication of the human being.
At first we are afraid of being punished, but later we are also afraid of not receiving the reward, of not being good enough for mom or dad or a brother or teacher. This is how the need to be accepted is born. Before that we don't care if we are or not. People's opinions are not important and they are not important because we just want to play and live in the present.
The fear of not getting the reward becomes the fear of being rejected. And the fear of not being good enough for another person is what makes us try to change, what makes us create an image.
Image that we try to project according to what they want us to be, only to be accepted, only to receive the prize. In this way we learn to pretend that we are what we are not and persevere in being another person with the sole purpose of being good enough for mom, dad, teacher, our religion or whoever it is. And for this purpose we practice tirelessly until we become masters of being what we are not.
Soon we forget who we really are and we begin to live our images, because we do not create one, but many different, according to the different groups of people with whom we interact. An image for home, one for school, and when we grow up, a few more.
And this works the same way when it comes to a simple relationship between a man and a woman. The woman has an external image that tries to project others, and when she is alone, another of herself. The same goes for man, who also has an exterior and an interior image. Now, when they reach adulthood, the interior and exterior image are so different that they almost no longer correspond. And since in the relationship between a man and a woman there are at least four images, how is it possible that they really get to know each other? They don't know each other. The only possibility is to try to understand the image. But more images need to be considered.
When a man meets a woman, an image of her is made, and in turn the woman becomes an image of the man from her point of view. Then he tries to make her fit the image that he has created and she tries to make him fit the image that has been made of him. Now, among them there are six images. Obviously, even if they don't know, they are lying to each other. Their relationship is based on fear, on lies, and not on the truth because it is impossible to see through all that mist.
As children, we do not experience any conflict because we do not pretend to be what we are not. Our images do not really change until we begin to relate to the outside world and stop having the protection of our parents. This is the reason why adolescence is particularly difficult. Even if we are prepared to sustain and defend our images, as soon as we try to project them to the outside world, it rejects them. The outside world begins to show us, not only privately, but also publicly, that we are not what we pretend to be.
This would be the case, for example, of a teenage boy who seems to be very smart. He goes to a debate in the school, and, in that debate, someone who is smarter, and who is more prepared, surpasses him and leaves him ridiculous in front of everyone. Then he tries to explain, excuse and justify his image in front of his companions. He is very kind to everyone and tries to save that image in front of them, although he knows he is lying. Of course, he goes out of his way not to lose control in front of them, but as soon as he finds himself alone and is reflected in a mirror, he makes him shatter. He hates himself; He feels truly stupid and thinks he is the worst. There is a great discrepancy between the inner image and the image that it tries to project towards the outside world. Well, the bigger the discrepancy, the more difficult it is to adapt to society's dream and the less love you have for yourself.
Between the image that pretends to be and the inner image that it has of itself when it is alone, there are lies and more lies. Both images are completely removed from reality; they are false, but he is not aware of it. Perhaps another person notices it, but he is totally blind. His denial system tries to protect the wounds, but these are real and he feels pain because he tries to defend that image by all means.
From small we learn that the opinions of all people are important and we direct our lives according to those opinions.
A simple opinion of someone, even if it is not true, is able to make us fall into the deepest of the hells: How ugly you are. You are wrong. You are stupid. Opinions have great power over the absurd behavior of people living in hell. That is why we need to hear that we are good, that we are doing well, that we are beautiful. What do I look like? Has what I said been good? How am I doing it?
We need to listen to the opinions of others because we are domesticated and those opinions have the power to manipulate us. That is why we seek recognition in others; we need their emotional support; be accepted by the external dream through the others. This is why teenagers drink alcohol, get high or start smoking. Only to be accepted by other people who think that this is what needs to be done; only for these people to consider that they are on the wave.
But all those false images that we try to project cause great suffering in many human beings. People pretend to be very important, but at the same time, we believe that we are nothing.
We put a lot of effort into being someone in the dream of that society, in gaining recognition and in receiving the approval of others. We make a great effort to be important, to succeed, to be powerful, rich, famous, to express our personal dream and impose our dream on the people around us. Why? Because we believe that the dream is real and we take it very seriously.
Excerpt from the book: The Mastery of Love.
A book of Toltec wisdom Dr. Miguel Ruiz
