From Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love:
“I want you to imagine that you live on a planet where every inhabitant suffers from a skin disease. The people on this planet have lived with this illness for two or three thousand years. Their entire bodies are covered with wounds that are infected and extremely painful to the touch. Of course, they believe this is the normal condition of human skin. Even medical books describe this disease as a normal state.
When people are born, their skin is healthy, but after three or four years the first wounds begin to appear. By the time they reach adolescence, their entire bodies are covered with sores.
Can you imagine how such people would treat one another? In order to interact, they must protect their wounds. They hardly touch each other, because it hurts too much. If you accidentally touch someone’s skin, the pain is so intense that they immediately become angry and touch you back in order to hurt you in return. And yet, the instinct for love is so strong that people are willing to pay this high price in order to relate to one another.
Now imagine that one day a miracle happens. You wake up and see that your skin is completely healed. There are no more wounds, and it no longer hurts when someone touches you. Healthy skin feels wonderful when touched, because it is meant to feel and to receive. Can you imagine having healthy skin in a world where everyone else is sick? You cannot touch others because it hurts them, and no one touches you because they assume it will hurt you.
If you can imagine this, you may begin to understand how an extraterrestrial being would feel if it came to visit humanity. But it is not our skin that is covered with wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is afflicted with a disease called fear. Like infected skin, our emotional body is covered with wounds filled with emotional poison. This fear expresses itself as anger, hatred, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy. The result of this disease is all the emotions that cause human suffering.
Everyone suffers from the same illness. One could even say that our world is a psychiatric hospital. This condition has existed for thousands of years, and medical and psychological textbooks describe it as normal. They consider it normal, but I tell you: it is not.
When fear becomes overwhelming, the rational mind begins to break down, unable to bear all these wounds filled with poison. In physiology textbooks this state is called mental illness. We label it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis – but these conditions arise when the rational mind is so terrified and the wounds are so painful that it becomes easier to cut off contact with the outside world.
People live in constant fear of being hurt, and this creates enormous drama wherever we go.
The way people treat one another is so emotionally painful that we become angry, jealous, envious, and sad for no apparent reason. Even saying “I love you” can feel frightening. And yet, despite how painful and frightening emotional contact can be, we continue to enter relationships, get married, and have children.
In order to protect our emotional wounds, and out of fear of being hurt, we humans create something very complex in our minds: a great system of denial.
Within this system of denial, we become perfect liars. We lie so well that we even lie to ourselves and believe our own lies. We do not notice that we are lying, and when we do notice, we justify the lie in order to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.
The system of denial is like a wall of fog before our eyes that blinds us to the truth. We wear social masks because it is too painful to see ourselves or to let others see us as we truly are. This system of denial makes us want others to see us as we believe ourselves to be. We build protective barriers to keep others out, but these barriers also keep us trapped inside, limiting our freedom. People defend themselves, and when someone says, ‘You’re stepping on my sore spot,’ that is not entirely true. The truth is that you are touching a wound in their mind, and they react because it hurts.
When you realize that everyone around you has emotional wounds filled with emotional poison, it becomes easy to understand human relationships within what the Toltecs call the dream of hell.
From the Toltec point of view, everything we believe about ourselves and everything we know about our world is a dream. If you look at any religious description of hell, you will see that it is exactly like human society, like the way we dream our lives. Hell is a place of suffering, fear, war, and violence; a place of judgment without redemption; a place of punishment without end. People against people in a jungle of predators; people filled with judgments, guilt, and emotional poison—anger, hatred, sadness, suffering. We create these little demons in our minds because we have learned to dream hell in our own lives.”
— Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
Note: The quoted passages are translated from Bulgarian.
