Toltec wisdom on love and the nature of life
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Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship (a Toltec Wisdom Book) is a quick but valuable read. It’s explained in simple terms, but because it’s a spiritual book, some ideas are abstract and difficult to understand.
The overarching messages are:
Our perception of the world and reality gets distorted by negative conditioning.
Our mind mistakenly thinks it’s the body, and thus creates false needs which cause us to suffer.
Love underlies everything; it’s just masked by a fog of pain and fear that we’ve been conditioned to feel.
A successful relationship requires both partners to accept each other as they are and realize each person is responsible for their own happiness and needs.
Our capacity to love is what makes us happy.
Background/the Toltec
“A Toltec is an artist of Love, an artist
of the Spirit, someone who is creating
every moment, every second, the most
beautiful art—the Art of Dreaming.”
As seen in the title, this is a “Toltec Wisdom Book.” The Toltecs were a society of scientists and artists who preceded the Aztecs and lived in southern Mexico from the mid-10th – 12th century.
The author, Don Miguel Ruiz, notes that Toltec isn’t a religion, but a way of life centered around happiness and love, and Ruiz is responsible for passing down the Toltec’s spiritual knowledge.
How we start in the world
“The happiest moments in our lives are when we are playing just like children, when we are singing and dancing, when we are exploring and creating just for fun.”
We are perfect when we first enter this world; we are full of curiosity, love, and excitement. And as children, our natural state is happiness and play, which allows us to give love to everything around us. However, we are born into a world of fear.
How our minds get corrupted
“We domesticate humans the same way we domesticate a dog or any other animal: with punishment and reward.”
Society and our parents condition us to fear instead of love, which leads to emotional wounds. For instance, when we’re punished by our parents or teachers (usually for their problems, worries, and emotions), our love for them starts to fade. We become angry, resentful, or fearful and lash out at the person punishing us or bottle up our emotions until we can release them onto someone else: “usually in a normal relationship in hell, it’s about payment for an injustice; it’s about getting even.” When we release this emotional poison into the world, a vicious cycle of anger, retaliation, and suffering ensues.
We fear being hurt, and because our minds are so powerful, we create a false depiction of reality where we’ve been wronged and where people will hurt us—essentially, our mind creates Hell on earth. Once we’ve accepted this world of negativity and fear, we also create false images of ourselves to meet the image of perfection society creates. The larger the discrepancy between who we genuinely are and who we think society wants us to be (or even who we think we are), the greater we suffer. In reality, we are perfect as we are.
The disconnect between the body and the mind
“When the mind believes it is the body, the needs are only illusions, and they cannot be fulfilled.”
One of the sources of our suffering is the disconnect between the body and the mind. Everything the body needs is valid. The body indicating that it’s hungry or cold is a legitimate need. Problems arise when the mind intervenes—the mind doesn’t know who it is, so it thinks it’s the body and tries to interpret the body’s needs. It either misinterprets these needs or fills them with emotional wounds; we eat even though we’re not hungry. It’s important not to repress our physical instincts or to allow our minds to judge them.
Conversely, the needs of the mind are usually false and fear-based. Our minds can be detrimental because they try to answer the question “who or what am I?” But the mind doesn’t have an identity and, according to Ruiz, it doesn’t realize that it is actually a force that is common to and underlies every living being.
To remedy this, we must split our needs into two categories and prevent the mind from interpreting the body’s needs: “these are the needs of the body. These are the needs of the mind.” And we must love and appreciate our bodies: “If you look at your body, you will find billions of living beings who depend on you. Every cell in your body is a living being that depends on you. You are responsible for all of those beings.”
Relationships
“It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.”
Love is always one-sided; either it’s not reciprocated or one person loves the other more. The person who loves more feels wronged because their love isn’t reciprocated to the same extent, which leads to hurt, fear, and retaliation. But the mistake is in expecting to be loved back. We can’t expect to be loved back in a relationship because only love for ourselves can fulfill us. If we respect and love ourselves, we don’t need others’ love.
One of the reasons relationships suffer is because we try to change our partners to match our false perceptions of who they are—false because we can never genuinely understand them or their dreams. We must accept our partners (and ourselves) exactly as they are, because we cannot change them and if we tried to, this would mask the truth of who they are.
Relationships also suffer because we think our partners should be responsible for our happiness. Our partners cannot be responsible for our happiness or fulfill our needs because they can never truly understand our needs, experiences, and dreams. We must solve our problems and heal our emotional wounds on our own—our partners will not be able to solve them for us, and we shouldn’t suck them down into our misery.
Because we can’t change our partners, we should seek people who already have qualities that align with our preferences: “someone who wants to go in the same direction as you do, someone who is compatible with your views and your values—emotionally, physically, economically, spiritually.” And a good relationship requires communication, respect, trust, finding our voices, and stating our needs (without the expectation that the other person will fulfill those needs).
How to reverse our suffering
“That is the healing. Three simple points: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love.”
Our minds are extremely powerful. We have the power to heal ourselves and create heaven on earth. We control our lives because everything we perceive is due to the mind’s volition. Nothing can exist without us, so just as we create Hell with our minds, we can destroy it with our minds.
We must start by taking responsibility for our lives and how we think and see the world—what we believe and how we judge or victimize ourselves. We suffer because everything in the world is deeply interconnected—the force of life underlies everything. Thus, when we suffer, feel bad about ourselves, and lash out, we impact many others in a domino effect. If we can control our reactions, we can avoid suffering and inflicting suffering onto others: “Your reactions are the key to having a wonderful life. If you can learn to control your own reactions, then you can change your routines, and you can change your life.” We must rewire our reactions and thought patterns one at a time.
Then to heal our emotional wounds, we need to see the truth—not lies built by society and conditioned into us, like notions of right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, or the false images we project about ourselves. The nature of every living being is perfect, so anything to the contrary is a departure from the truth. Truth allows us to see things as they are, not as we want them to be—like how when someone lashes out, it’s from their emotional wounds and not from our shortcomings. Recognizing this allows us to forgive them. Finally, healing requires us to love ourselves.
Our capacity to love is the ultimate solution
“What makes you happy is love coming out of you.”
The capacity to love is what makes us happy and what will fulfill us. It’s essential to love ourselves deeply so we can love everyone and everything around us—which requires healing our emotional wounds, changing our reactions, and returning to a childlike state of love and excitement. Ruiz’s primary message is that “love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it.” We must uncover it.
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Sources
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastery-Love-Practical-Relationship-Toltec/dp/1878424424