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"The Five Agreements" - Awakening to Authentic Self-Hood!
My Art, Artistry and transformations has been "The Hero's Journey"!
Date: 11/15/2011 3:52:22 AM ( 13 y ) ... viewed 2966 times I made mention of "The Four Agreements" and "The Fifth Agreement" in my last blog entry. I recently finished "The Fifth Agreement". It's time for me to start a new blog on this.
I began connecting some memories while reading on page 134: "...we don't rebel". That was true for me through about my second year of high school; till about the Summer of 1967. I was fifteen years old and as of that Summer things began to change for me in terms of my behavior. Up till then I was extremely obedient!
"... we try to recover our personal freedom". I was attending an all-boy high school and as I was ending my second year I told my father I wanted to switch to my local co-ed high school but I was flatly denied any consideration for that and told that graduating from the technical high school I was attending would be the last requirement that he would make of me. I graduated from that school and within about a month my father said I had three choices: get a job, go to college or join the service. He lied to me!
In my mind I had agreed to his "last requirement" to essentially complete that domineering relationship and to have the freedom to make my own choices, live my own life! At the time of his new "offer" with his three options I did not even recall the promise that he had made to me a couple years earlier! I also had not recovered any of my freedom to even talk with him about it. I was still a very obedient boy who did not disagree, talk back or virtually say anything that would be seen as anything but perfect obedience. I decided to join the service.
My initial "rebellion" surfaced when I was in the service at my duty station on a cutter and a seaman came on board who was awaiting discharge. I learned how he was able to get that. I soon followed the same strategy; essentially asking to be discharged as I realized that joining the service was wholly my father's idea and that all I really wanted was to play my music with my friends!
Quoting "The Fifth Agreement": my desire for "The freedom to be who we really are" reached a literal breaking point about nine months after I made the choice to leave the service. That was when I had deliberately shattered my mirror and with extraordinary intention![1] I have previously written a paper on this titled: T.O.M.M.Y. (as an acronym for: "Transformation Of My Mythological Youth". (Maybe I can get what I wrote online some day and link to that from this blog.) I had identified with the Who's Tommy, his dramatic, transformational journey in a most profoundly deep way! How many people do you know who were into the TOMMY "opera"[2] and subsequently ended up breaking their mirrors?! Well I am certainly one and let me tell you about it! Nothing has been the same for me since the day I broke through my mirror! Not only was that event the literal breaking point in my "life" at that time, breaking the mirror was the most powerful thing I could do at that time to begin breaking out of my virtual reality and toward the truth of my self![3]
About four and a half months later I was escorted out of my home by my father and given a room in the local YMCA and started to explore what is was to be "free" - on my own!
In addition to TOMMY there were a couple other albums that had significant influences on me at that time including: "On The Threshold Of A Dream" (1969) by the Moody Blues[4] and "The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus" (released in late 1970) by Spirit! I had some suspicions of living in a dream by the time I got into the "dreams" of Dr. Sardonicus. I remember my questioning "reality"[5] to a point where I wanted to connect with the source of where my life/dream was coming from so I could get out of the dream that I was beginning to realize was a dream of hell! Just as "The Fifth Agreement" says: "In the dream of the first attention, the authentic self has no chance; it's a complete victim. ... But now we no longer want to be the victim, and we try to change our world. ... The whole thing is happening in our mind. It's a war against the part of our mind that makes all the choices that guide us into our personal hell." I witnessed my personal hell enveloping me. I dove inwardly as best as I was able to at the time and discovered inner darkness and my fears of the unknown that I was not unable to bare at the time and I withdrew my focus inwardly back to the outer world that I imagined had been damned and decending into hell! I imagined a Dante's inferno waiting for me in the hallway just outside my door at the YMCA. I wasn't aware of it at the time but my higher-self knew it was only the virtual reality in my mind and I believe that higher "will" moved through me and compelled me to open the door even though I was imagining that I could be entering into a river of the dead, literally stepping on the heads of the dead - bobbing in that river!
That was about five months after I broke my mirror, entering the "war"! I fought this war over the course of many years. I finally achieved a tremendous victory just three and a half years ago with a visit to see my father before, during and after his second heart surgery! Peace at long last with my father! In a dream I had this year, near my anniversary, I am in front of a mirror, I put on my father's work shirt (guard) and look at my image in the mirror and I see my father's face as my face and I am at peace!
Ever since writing T.O.M.M.Y. (the Transformation Of My Mythological Youth) I have had at least a seed awareness that I am the artist of my life's story (aka my personal mythology) and that it is truly an account of personal transformation. This is reflected in my creation of two issues of "Transformations" (1981-82), a small paper I published when I was living in Escondido. I featured Neal Donald Walsh in both issues plus Dr. Chuck Spezzano:
http://chuckandlencyspezzano.com/.
After the second issue I made an unsuccessful attempt to transform the publication into more of a community: "Transformational Network".
I am an artist, however I have barely begun to create the full outer artistic expression! Never-the-less I already know that I enjoy the whole entire process that begins firstly with the "story" the accounting of the life-based experience and my initial artistic inspirations of the accounts as well as everything else under the categories of pre-production, production, post-production, the finale edit, reproduction and distribution! Sometimes I think of this as G.O.D.: Generating, Organizing and Distributing!
May my G.O.D. Bless You!
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October 19, 2018 - Revisiting "The Fifth Agreement" Book -
The "Enchanted Garden Onion" where I live has a meditation studio headed by a "fellow gardener" (and former housemate) who has students attending his classes at least twice a week. Earlier this evening I met one of the students and he invited me to attend a class. I thanked him and told him quite honestly that I was hesitant to fully accept his invite on account of the fact that he is not the head of the class and that from my perspective I view the studio essentially as his and I do not want to make any assumptions about invites into his studio. Continuing I said I have adopted the Four Agreements and then asked the student if he was familiar with them. he wasn't so I summarized the four with a little extra emphasis in one way or another on the third agreement - make no assumptions! He asked me about the wisdom tradition where Don Miguel was drawing his teachings for and in the moment I did not remember that it was "Toltec". I said I could refer to one of the two books I have and offered to do that in the moment if he could wit a minute to which he agreed and I ran and got The Fifth Agreement from my space and let him have it till the end of his class. With the book back in my hands i opened it and saw my highlight in the Epilogue: Help me to Change the World. I then found this online:
"I invite you to participate in a new dream for humanity, one in which all of us can live in harmony, truth, and love. In this dream, people of all religions and all philosophies are not just welcome, but respected. It doesn't matter whether you believe in Christ, Moses, Allah, Brahma, Buddha, or any other being or master; everybody is welcome to share this dream. Each one of us has our own beliefs, our own point of view. There are billions of different points of view, but it's the same light, the same force of life behind each one of us.
If you feel the truth in these words, then I invite you to open your heart and help me to change the world. Of course, the very first question is: How are you going to change the world? The answer is easy. By changing your world. When I ask you to help me to change the world, I'm not talking about planet Earth. I'm referring to the world that exists in your head. You will not change the world if you don't change your own world first. The change begins with you. You will change the world by loving yourself, by enjoying life, by making your personal world a dream of heaven.
If you decide that you want to help me change the world, the easiest way is by practicing Five Agreements. If you practice them, if you make them your way of life, there won't be any more war in your head. There won't be any more war with your loved ones. There will be peace."[6]
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On page 222 in the book it reads: "... you are the only one who can change your world." In re-reading that a moment ago I thought of the opening line in "Prelude: Nothin' to Hide" by Spirit:
"You have the world at your fingertips
No one can make it better than you"[7]
Finally on page 225: "All we need is to be aware of what we are doing , and to return to our authenticity" to which I added a footnote saying this is "the quintessence of Human Design".
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Notes:
[1] (As of Nov. 25, 2011):
I count the breaking of my mirror as the start time of my "pathway of transformation". August, 1970. I feel that I have had forty years of a kind of probation and testing between 1970 -'71 and 2010 - '11.
"forty is the number of probation and of testing":
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/universe/jonah.6.html
"42" is the number associated with Christ as the 42nd generation from "Abraham".: http://www.lifeofchrist.com/life/genealogy/print.html
This current year of my life is the 42nd year as of the breaking of my mirror and therefor a potentially most powerful one in preparation for the new! I expect miracles to become my way of life within the next ten months!
[2] #96 in the top 500 albums of all time:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691...
[3] According to Lawrence Noyes, author of "The Enlightenment Intensive": "One way or the other, the mind must be broken out of in order to have a real possibility to directly experience the true self. What can be done to win this inner battle?" ("This inner battle" is the same one that is very well identified and talked about at length in the "two books" on the "Agreements".) Lawrence equates the requirement to break out with winning an inner battle.
"If people really wished to look into their inner being, they would ... have to break the inner mirror ... We can no more gaze into the inner human being with ordinary consciousness than we can look behind a mirror without breaking it." - "The Inner Life Of The Earth"
The five "Agreements" talk about gradually and incrementally breaking our agreements with our false self that we created according to the lies that we believed regarding who and what we are, life and others. My choice in 1970 to break through my false outer image was consciously concentrated into one deliberate act of shattering my mirror (which in my psyche reflected my false self) with the intention of allowing my true self to be revealed and expressed!
Lawrence also speaks of dealing with the mind by way of communication, however, communication was not a real option for me at the time! The status of that is something I addressed at length in my T.O.M.M.Y. paper where the Tommy archetype is "dumb" and has "nothing to say". Definitely an image that deserved to be shattered!
Under a subsection titled: "Communication and The Self" he says: "Many have grown up in a situation of too much interruption and judgement. They learned to habitually withhold the fuller truths of who they are in order to avoid the pain and the turmoil that went with it. This strategy may have made sense at the time, but over the long term it created a serious problem: the person gradually knew less an less about who he or she really is."
[4] "Threshold Of A Dream" needs to be seen as a continuing stream of what was already living in me of the previous works by the Moody Blues namely: "Days of Future Past". A major keynote in that well recognized ground-breaking masterpiece relates to the song: "Nights in White Satin". Up until just yesterday I had projected something of my own imagination onto the title hearing it as "Knights" in White Satin! Talk about a personal mythology! What might that say of where my mind was as of that time?
[5] The "Five Agreements" speak of our virtual reality that only exists in our mind.
[6] http://www.shareguide.com/Ruiz.html
"Excerpted and adapted from The Fifth Agreement, ©2010 by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D., Jose Luis Ruiz, and Janet Mills. Reprinted by permission of Amber-Allen Publishing, Inc. in San Rafael, CA. Available in stores or visit http://www.amberallen.com.
For nearly three decades, don Miguel Ruiz has shared his unique blend of ancient wisdom and modern-day awareness through lectures, workshops, and journeys to sacred sites around the world. His bestselling books have been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. Learn more at http://www.miguelruiz.com.
[7] https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/13950121/Spirit/Prelude%3A+Nothin%27+to+Hide
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Keywords:
The Four Agreements, personal freedom, obedient, obedience, rebellion, Transformation, Who's TOMMY, breaking point, breaking the mirror, Threshold Of A Dream, The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, authentic self, victim, personal hell, art, artist, personal mythology, inner mirror
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