Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

don Miguel Ruiz was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera (healer) mother and a nagual (shaman) grandfather. The family anticipated that Miguel would embrace their centuries-old legacy of healing and teaching, and carry forward the esoteric Toltec knowledge. Instead, distracted by modern life, Miguel chose to attend medical school and become a surgeon. A near-death experience changed his life. Stunned by this experience, he began an intensive practice of self-inquiry. He devoted himself to the mastery of the ancient ancestral wisdom, studying earnestly with his mother, and completing an apprenticeship with a powerful shaman in the Mexican desert. In the tradition of the Toltecs, a nagual guides an individual to personal freedom. don Miguel is a nagual from the Eagle Knight lineage, and is dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltecs. He is the author of The Four Agreements, The Mastery of Love, and The Four Agreements Companion Book. Website: www.MiguelRuiz.com

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The Mastery of Love

Amber-Allen Publishing

Chapter One

The Wounded Mind

Perhaps you have never thought about it, but on one level or another, all of usare masters. We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule ourown lives.

    Just as societies and religions around the world create incredible mythologies,we create our own. Our personal mythology is populated by heroes and villains,angels and demons, kings and commoners. We create an entire population in ourmind, including multiple personalities for ourselves. Then we master the imagewe are going to use in certain circumstances. We become artists of pretendingand projecting our images, and we master whatever we believe we are. When wemeet other people, we classify them right away, and assign them a role in ourlives. We create an image for others, according to what we believe they are. Andwedo the same thing with everyone and everything around us.

    You have the power to create. Your power is so strong that whatever you believecomes true. You create yourself, whatever you believe you are. You are the wayyou are because that is what you believe about yourself. Your whole reality,everything you believe, is your creation. You have the same power as any otherhuman in the world. The main difference between you and someone else is how youapply your power, what you create with your power. You may be similar to othersin many ways, but no one in the whole world lives her life the way you do.

    You have practiced all of your life to be what you are, and you do it so wellthat you master what you believe you are. You master your own personality, yourown beliefs; you master every action, every reaction. You practice for years andyears, and you achieve the level of mastery to be what you believe you are. Oncewe can see that all of us are masters, we can see what kind of mastery we have.

    When we are children, and we have a problem with someone, we get angry. Forwhatever reason, that anger pushes the problem away; we get the result we want.It happens a second time?we react with anger?and now we know if we get angry wepush the problem away. Then we practice and practice, until we become masters ofanger.

    In the same way, we become masters of jealousy, masters of sadness, masters ofself-rejection. All of our drama and suffering is by practice. We make anagreement with ourselves, and we practice that agreement until it becomes awhole mastery. The way we think, the way we feel, and the way we act become soroutine that we no longer need to put our attention on what we are doing. It isjust by action-reaction that we behave a certain way.

    To become masters of love, we have to practice love. The art of relationship isalso a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice. Tomaster a relationship is therefore about action. It is not about concepts orattaining knowledge. It is about action. Of course, to have action, we need tohave some knowledge, or at least a little more awareness of the way humansoperate.

* * *

I want you to imagine that you live on a planet where everyone has a skindisease. For two or three thousand years, the people on your planet havesuffered the same disease: Their entire bodies are covered by wounds that areinfected, and those wounds really hurt when you touch them. Of course, theybelieve this is a normal physiology of the skin. Even the medical books describethis disease as a normal condition. When the people are born, their skin ishealthy, but around three or four years of age, the first wounds start toappear. By the time they are teenagers, there are wounds all over their bodies.

    Can you imagine how these people are going to treat each other? In order torelate with one another, they have to protect their wounds. They hardly evertouch each other?s skin because it is too painful. If by accident you touchsomeone?s skin, it is so painful that right away she gets angry and touches yourskin, just to get even. Still, the instinct to love is so strong that you pay ahigh price to have relationships with others.

    Well, imagine that a miracle occurs one day. You awake and your skin iscompletely healed. There are no wounds anymore, and it doesn?t hurt to betouched. Healthy skin you can touch feels wonderful because the skin is made forperception. Can you imagine yourself with healthy skin in a world where everyonehas a skin disease? You cannot touch others because it hurts them, and no onetouches you because they make the assumption that it will hurt you.

    If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from anotherplanet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But itisn?t our skin that is full of wounds. What thevisitor would discover is thatthe human mind issick with a disease called fear. Just like the description ofthe infected skin, the emotional body is full ofwounds, and these wounds areinfected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear isanger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all theemotions that make humans suffer.

    All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that thisworld is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world forthousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and thepsychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but Ican tell you it is not normal.

    When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can nolonger take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books wecall this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, butthese diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and thewounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outsideworld.

    Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big dramawherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painfulthat for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say ?Ilove you? can be frightening. But even if it?s painful and fearful to have anemotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we getmarried, and we have children.

    In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt,humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. Inthat denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lieto ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don?t notice we are lying, andsometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lieto protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

    The denial system is like a wall of fog in front of our eyes that blinds us fromseeing the truth. We wear a social mask because it?s too painful to seeourselves or to let others see us as we really are. And the denial system letsus pretend that everyone believes what we want them to believe about us. We putup these barriers for protection, to keep other people away, but those barriersalso keep us inside, restricting our...