Book Reviews: The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love

I will blog more about the Two Party System and the need for election modernization tomorrow, but today I would like to do a brief review of a couple books I have read recently. The books are familiar to many people; they are called
The Four Agreements, and
The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz. The books have a relatively simple premise,
that is, in life, through socialization or "domestication" as Ruiz terms it, we make many agreements with ourselves, even a countless number of them based on our need to feel liked, loved, and accepted, and based on the many inputs we receive from other people. Through these agreements, according to Ruiz, we become part of "The Dream," which is where the vast majority of human beings live for their entire life. "The Dream" is Hell on Earth; it is the pain and misery that humans seem addicted to, and as a result, subject themselves to, each and every day.

He uses an ancient Toltec term "mitote" (pronounced MI-TOH-TAY), which he describes as a sort of "fog" that prevents us from seeing the way things really are, that is, the way things would be if we woke up from "The Dream." Ruiz puts it this way:

"When you are aware that everyone around you has emotional wounds with emotional poison, you can easily understand the relationship of humans in what the Toltecs call the dream of hell. From the Toltec perspective, everything we believe about ourselves, and everything we know about our world, is a dream. If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends. There are humans versus humans in a jungle of predators; humans full of judgment, full of blame, full of guilt, full of emotional poison--envy, anger, hate, sadness, suffering. We create all these little demons in our mind because we have learned to dream hell into our own life."

It reminds me of a Bob Marley song that Johnny Cash remade on his posthumously released album "Unearthed," called "Redemption Song." The pertinent line says "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds." The analog to Ruiz's point of course is that our dream of hell, which is where we live everyday, is "mental slavery." We are enslaved to all of the poison of the world.

To put this theory into the context of the Christian tradition, "The Dream" is really what Christians would call "Original Sin." It is what orients us against our neighbor and consequently against God, since Sin is the opposite of Love. For a long period of time in my life, I was a Calvinist, and did not believe in Free Will, because I saw so many elements of compulsive Sin in the world, the horrors and violence that have taken place throughout history, and the atrocities committed each day, man against fellow man, whether it is genocide in the Sudan or forced abortions in China. The dim, deterministic vision of Calvinism, however, caused me to spiral into a deep spiritual depression, and I ultimately was forced to abandon it for the sake of my own mental and emotional well-being. However, after reflecting on Ruiz's descriptions of Hell and "The Dream," I have come to a deep understanding of the certain level of truth in the Calvinistic understanding, but also where the Calvinists miss the point.

"I have said that we never chose to have the Parasite, which is the Judge, the Victim and the Belief System. If we know we didn't have a choice, and we have the awareness that it's nothing but a dream, we recover something very important that we lost--something that religions call "free will." Religions say that when humans were created, God gave us free will. This is true, but the Dream took it away from us and kept it, because the Dream controls the will of most humans." (from The Mastery of Love)

Here we can see the Christian concept of "The Fall from Grace." If we think of Genesis Chapter 2 as a metaphor for the lives of every human being, I think it becomes all the more clear. We, as children, are naturally inclined toward happiness and a carefree attitude toward life. Children, as a rule, do not worry about paychecks, meals, bills, or any of those things. They would continue in such a state unless they learned different behavior. Without the knowledge of "Good" and "Evil" children would continue to play and run and laugh, but as soon as an adult says "If you do X or Y, then you are a bad boy," then suddenly children have been fed the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by the Serpent, which is the adult who himself has already fallen from Grace. It is actually quite remarkable how tightly the metaphor fits.

In The Four Agreements, Ruiz says that in order to get out of the Dream, in order to get out of Hell on Earth, we must break all of the old agreements we made with ourselves, and to make new agreements. To extend the Christian metaphor as a grid through which the Western mind can perhaps more easily grasp the metaphysical points Ruiz is making, the breaking of the old agreements is symbolized in the Christian sacrament of Baptism (I must note here that my Episcopalianism fails me here, as I do not think this metaphor works when applied to Paedobaptism). In Baptism, the Sinner is symbolically buried, and then resurrected, as an imitation of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The Baptists use the phrase "Raised to walk in the newness of life." What a beautiful phrase.

This is what Salvation is; Salvation from Hell, from "The Dream," and it was accomplished by The Wounded Healer (to borrow a phrase from Henri Nouwen), who through love and exposing his own wounds, healed the wounds of the world by returning us to the state we were in before we fell into the Dream, before we ate of the Poisoned Fruit. It is no wonder that Christ admonished his disciples to "become like children" in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Reflect on that reality; it is quite a powerful thought.

For anybody who doubts or rejects the interpretations I am rendering, one needs look no further than the extraordinarily metaphysical Gospel According to St. John. "In the beginning was the Word (that is, the Logos), and the Word was with God and the Word was God, and the same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it...The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God."

Indeed, we are then able to break our old agreements, those agreements that cause envy, jealously, hatred, strife, backbiting, and all the things that are poison, and instead allow us to make new agreements. These new agreements are described as follows by Ruiz:

1. Be Impeccable with your Words.
2. Don't Take Things Personally
3. Don't Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best

These agreements are embodied by what Paul calls "The Fruit of the Spirit," in his Epistle to the Galatians Church, enumerated as "Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control." The Fruit of the Spirit are what flow from ending the old agreements with "Sin" and making these new agreements.

I would strongly recommend both The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love to people, of whatever faith background or tradition, as I think they are metaphysical truths that transcend the human experience.

If we all would engage in deep self examination at the metaphysical level, I believe we can all wake up from The Dream, from the collective Hell that we have created here on Earth, and begin living in peace and community with our fellow man.