Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements:
“We do not see the truth because we are blind. We are blinded by all those false beliefs in our minds.
We feel the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs condemn us to suffering. It is as if we live in a fog that does not allow us to see beyond the tip of our nose. We live in a fog that is not even real. This fog is a dream—your own dream of life: your beliefs, all your ideas about your own essence, all your agreements with others, with yourself, and even with God.
Your entire mind is a fog that the Toltecs call mitote.
Your mind is a dream in which thousands of people are speaking at the same time and no one understands anyone else. This is the condition of the human mind—a great mitote—and because of this great mitote you cannot see your true essence. In India, mitote is called maya, which also means illusion. This is the image the personality has of ‘I am.’
Everything you believe about yourself and about the world, all the ideas and programs in your mind, are mitote. We cannot see who we really are; we cannot realize that we are not free.
That is why people resist life. To be alive is the greatest fear of the human being.
Death is not the scariest thing for us; our greatest fear is to take the risk of being alive—the risk of being alive and expressing our true essence. To be oneself is the greatest fear of the human being.
We have learned to live by trying to satisfy the demands of others. We have learned to live according to other people’s ideas out of fear that we will not be accepted and will not be good enough for someone else.
In the process of domestication, we form our idea of perfection in order to try to be good enough. We imagine what we should be like so that everyone will accept us. We strive hard to please the people who love us—our mother and father, our older brothers and sisters, the priests and the teachers. In trying to be good enough for them, we create an idea of perfection, but we do not live up to that idea. We will never be perfect from that point of view. Never!
Because we are not perfect, we reject ourselves. The degree of self-rejection depends on how well the adults have managed to break our wholeness.
After domestication, it is no longer about whether you are good enough for someone else. We are not good enough for ourselves because we do not live up to our own idea of perfection. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being what we wish to be, or rather what we believe we should be. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being perfect.
We know that we are not what we believe we should be, and so we feel false, disappointed, and dishonest. We try to hide and play roles. As a result, we feel inauthentic and wear social masks so that others will not notice. We are terribly afraid that someone might notice that we are not what we pretend to be. We judge others according to our idea of perfection and, quite naturally, they also do not meet our expectations.
We humiliate ourselves just to please others.
We even harm our physical bodies just to be accepted by others. We see young people taking drugs so as not to be rejected by their peers. They do not understand that the problem lies in their own self-rejection. They reject themselves because they are not what they pretend to be. They want to be something they are not, and therefore they feel shame and guilt. People constantly punish themselves for not being what they believe they should be. They torment themselves and provoke others to torment them as well.
But no one torments us as much as we torment ourselves, and it is precisely the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system that force us to do so. Yes, there are people who say that their husband, wife, mother, or father abused them, but you know that we abuse ourselves much more.
Our inner judge is the worst of all judges.
If we make a mistake in front of people, we try to deny it and cover it up. But once we are alone, the Judge rises in full force, guilt becomes unbearable, and we feel terribly stupid, bad, or pathetic.”**
Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
Love is not a feeling, but a basic mental attitude toward life. It is the ability to accept and not to judge. It is the courage to be true.
I believe it becomes clear why freeing ourselves from the fog in our mind, which Don Miguel calls “mitote,” is a fundamental lesson in love.
∗Note: The quoted passages are translated from Bulgarian.
