Although it's been ten years since the book first came out, I've recently been reading "The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book," by Don Miguel Ruiz. It's dynamic and interesting, and in places, he touches quite a bit on suffering and what he sees as our unfortunate lifelong addiction to it.
Because combat veterans and PTSD is what's frequently on my mind, it was hard to read what he wrote and not draw some parallels with our current topic. At the risk of minimizing the severity of what PTSD actually is, I still think it's instructive to consider what Ruiz says about suffering in general, and question ourselves about whether any of it applies. It's a short book, but much longer than I can do justice to here (so be sure to read it), but what I'm going to do is excerpt several passages that will at least introduce some key concepts. Also, the usual disclaimers. Ruiz is a philosopher, not a psychotherapist. That said, his insights are interesting, novel, and potentially also fairly valid. It's always worth turning over a concept that plagues us to see if there are any new ways of looking at it. That's what I hope talking about Ruiz' book here on this blog might do.
Early on in the book, Ruiz mentions the in-justice of having to pay, in our minds, many times over for the same "mistake" or bad act, and how different it would be if we could act badly once, suffer guilt once, and be done with it. It's not the case, though, and he describes it:
“How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is, thousands of times. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake that they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don’t need to do it again. But every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, and again, and again. If we have a wife or husband he or she also reminds us of the mistake, so we can judge ourselves again, and find ourselves guilty again. Is this fair?”
The problem with this is not only the lack of balance, but also what Ruiz emphasizes is the "emotional poison" that affects us:
“How many times do we make our spouse, our children, or our parents pay for the same mistake? Every time that we remember the mistake, we blame them again and send them all the emotional poison we feel at the injustice, and then we make them pay again for the same mistake. Is that justice? The Judge in the mind is wrong because the belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong. The whole dream is based on false law. Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.”
A conversation I had earlier this year with the head of trauma research for the National Institute of Mental Health still stands out in my mind, regarding what he said about blame: that those who blame others, or themselves, are the slowest to heal from tragedy and trauma. The fact of affixing blame, and not being able to move past it, apparently becomes an obstacle. We certainly know people (you and I both do) and sometimes we are people who are fixated on and obsessed with actions in the past. We may even be in a cycle of constantly churning over past events, constantly recycling and reliving them in our minds, always seeking a possibly different ending -- and perhaps this invades our sleep, not only our awake lives. The constant churn with no possible solution is exhausting, and it's numbing. It's also hard to break. But it's also important to break, because without it, there's no moving on.
Back to Ruiz:
“From the point of view of the Victim we can say that something sad happened to us, and from the point of view of the warrior, we can say that what happened to us is normal.”
And why that could be vitally important:
“Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening to you right now.”
Ahhh.
And then, most to our point (intention) here on this blog, what I hope we're all about:
“Awareness is always the first step because if you are not aware, there is nothing you can change. If you are not aware that your mind is full of wounds and emotional poison, you cannot begin to clean and heal the wounds and you will continue to suffer.”
“There is no reason to suffer. With awareness you can rebel and say, ‘This is enough!’ You can look for a way to heal and transform your personal dream.”
The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book. A small book with some insightful philosophical thoughts that just might start us on the path -- or lead us closer to -- personal transformation for dealing with suffering, loss and guilt.
