Читать книгу The Three Questions: How to Discover and Master the Power Within You - Barbara Emrys, Don Miguel Ruiz, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. - Страница 8

SIMPLE STORIES INVITE us to reflect on our own lives. One way or another, they represent everyone’s story. If a story is good, it has the power to inspire questions and encourage us to look for answers. If a story is very good, it can get under our skin and dare us to see the truth. It can open new doors of perception. These stories leave us a choice: to be challenged by the truth or to close the door and continue walking a familiar path.

This book is for those who are willing to see the truth of themselves. It is for those willing to ask what is real and to go through unfamiliar doors. Life is eager to begin a new conversation with you. If you’re willing to listen and to change, your world can be transformed.

We humans are what we are today because of the way our nervous system has responded to light over millions of years. Our brains have become intricate, our capabilities diverse, and our societies complex. We’ve certainly made our mark on this planet. And yet, if we were asked what we had to show for humanity’s years of evolution, what would we say?

Would we say that we’re free of worry and conflict? Would we say we finally understand how to be the best humans we can be? It would be wonderful to say that our beliefs no longer drive us to do terrible things. It would be great to say that our minds no longer wage their internal wars. It would be nice to say that humans have become far too wise to turn against each other. It would be nice to say that about our species, but we cannot—not yet, at least.

In an ideal world, humans get along with each other for their own benefit and for the benefit of humanity. In an ideal community, people cooperate in order to prosper, and they appreciate their good fortune. They value life and care for the land that nurtures them. Ideally, they respect themselves and everyone else.

In an ideal family, children are made to feel safe and appreciated. Parents are inspired teachers and vigilant protectors. The elderly continue to be productive. Groups of people form societies, of course, but no society tries to undermine any other. Together, they build greater communities, and together they ensure the well-being of every citizen.

In this world of our imagination, governments may still exist. An ideal government presides over a country with respect. Its leaders are wise and farseeing. The best possible congress is one that legislates with conscience and compassion. Its laws are clear and just—and the rules apply to everyone.

In this ideal world, people are also able to govern themselves justly. What does it mean to govern ourselves? It means we are in charge of our own thoughts and responsible for our own actions. We refuse to walk blindly through life. We see exactly what is and not merely what we prefer to see. We don’t permit the past to take command of the present. We view our personal reality the way a great artist would—with an eye for beauty and balance.

In an ideal world, we don’t punish ourselves repeatedly for one mistake. We don’t indulge in self-pity. We don’t manipulate emotions. We don’t gossip or seek out drama.

In an ideal world, we have no desire to judge or to blame. We are not defeated by guilt and shame, nor do we inflict shame on anyone else. In other words, we govern ourselves in the same way we want to be governed: with respect.

There is much more we could say about that ideal world, but it’s important to consider why this world doesn’t actually exist for most of us. Helping the world move toward its ideal expression is too great a task for a small book, but we can take the first steps on our own. Everything we build together as human beings begins with a little imagination. We may believe we are tragic victims of circumstance, but with imagination we can take another perspective and see how unkindly we treat ourselves. With all its thoughts and judgments, the mind may seem like our worst adversary, but by imagining the mind differently, we can make it our ally. By modifying the way our minds work we can begin to change our world.

We all have fears we won’t admit to ourselves, and we’re not always sure how to overcome them. We need love, but we’re not convinced we deserve it. We want to love ourselves, but we don’t know how. To one degree or another, there is chaos and confusion in each of us. Ideas take hold, and opinions intimidate. We get caught up in our own drama and take it all so seriously. We play roles that don’t reflect the truth of what we are.

Why do we do this to ourselves? The answer is that we were shown how, and we became masters at it.

Everyone is born an authentic being, but it is hard to remain authentic in a world where beliefs have already been assigned to us. As infants and children, we are told who we are, how we should behave, and how to respond to what we perceive. This is how families and cultures function most effectively and how children survive within their cultures. But that doesn’t mean these lessons are rooted in reality. You could say that our early training teaches us to deceive ourselves. We learn to lie.

Life is truth, and only life exists. By using words to describe the truth, we automatically distort it. So a lie is simply a distortion of the truth. There may be no malice intended, but we still use lies against ourselves and against each other.

We all know how little kids say the funniest things—funny, because they speak the truth as they perceive it, without judgment. Honest insights, plainly spoken, sound pretty shocking to adult ears. Why? In many cultures, stating an obvious truth is considered impolite. Honesty and authenticity are sometimes thought to be childlike qualities. At times, they might even be considered crazy. Most of us have learned to lie about what we see and how we feel. By the time we’ve reached adulthood, we’ve even learned to believe our lies.

Growing up, we develop strong minds, but minds can become corrupted. We form strong opinions, but our opinions don’t represent the truth. Emotional responses become corrupted when they are ruled by opinions and beliefs. We were created by a loving force, but we even learn to corrupt love.

Corruption sounds like a willful crime, but people don’t come into the world with corrupt intentions. We were born hungry for the truth and eager to love. Corruption happens when we put our faith in thoughts and ideas instead of what we perceive. We believe most of what we’re told and, in the process, we lose our connection with life—with truth. We create rules and structures that conform to what we’ve been taught to believe.

Love is one example of how our natural impulses can be poisoned by ideas. Too many of us were taught that love is conditional, that it comes with specific rules of engagement. To put it simply, love is corrupted by if.

We may not always hear if spoken out loud, but we sense it often enough, even between people who are devoted to each other.

 I will love you if you do what I want.

 I’ll love you if you stand by me, no matter what.

 I’ll love you if you do this or believe that.

 If you embarrass me, disagree with me, or leave me … I will stop loving you.

Amazingly, we say things like this to the people we care about most, just as we say them to ourselves. Yes, we set conditions on loving ourselves—conditions that are often too strict to meet. Real love comes with no conditions. And yet that’s not how most of us were taught to offer love and to receive it.

When we think of love as conditional, it becomes something else, something corrupt. Of course, this kind of corruption can be repaired, because it begins in the virtual world of the mind. Virtual reality is a reflection, an interpretation of what is real. The mind gives us an impression of everything we can touch and see, but it’s an impression. Ideas aren’t made of matter. Beliefs aren’t part of our genetic makeup. The mind isn’t actually real, and the fanciful world it creates doesn’t actually exist.

So what is the mind, and what does it do?

The mind is a function of the brain that turns perception into language. The ways we describe reality are unique to each of us. You have your way; I have mine. The difference depends on how our brains work, of course. It also depends on how we’ve been taught to perceive the world.

When we see an idyllic scene—such as a mountain range, green meadows, and open expanses of wilderness—some of us think of paradise. We react with excitement and pleasure. Others, seeing the same scenery, imagine extreme hardship and loneliness and react in fear. Where some see tranquility, others see disturbance. If we were taught to be afraid, we will likely continue to be afraid. If we believe that unfamiliar things are dangerous, we will avoid new experiences.

We were taught to interpret what we see. We were told what to believe and believed what we were told. We’ve been guided by private and public opinion since we were born. Reality is made of impressions and experiences to which we give personal meaning and value. It changes constantly, of course, since events keep changing. Our personal perception of reality is affected by our opinions and our fears.

Many beliefs encourage fear. Many beliefs are influenced by fear. Fear has had a big effect on the way we learned to view the world. Physical fear is natural and essential to our survival, but it’s important to remember that irrational fear is not. It is irrational to be afraid of what doesn’t exist. In fact, it can cause actual harm. And yet we’ve learned to let irrational fear shape our reality. We’ve learned to react emotionally in ways that other people do and to fear what we only imagine.

These reactions took time and practice to perfect. We followed the rules of our families and cultures. Our parents and teachers showed us how to behave in a world of humans, and we took those lessons with us into adulthood. Now we tell ourselves how to behave in much the same way. We follow the rules of society, but we’ve applied most of society’s rules to our own lives. We rule ourselves through self-made laws, personal judgments, and mental intimidation.

As children, we observed how our own family and our local community were governed. We followed the protocols of school, church, and the front office. To go against the rules usually resulted in a loss of respect among our peers. Sometimes the losses were far greater. We obeyed the rules of our city and state governments and the laws of our nation’s government. Breaking those rules meant paying bigger penalties. All of this influenced the way our minds work, and so you could say the way we run ourselves mirrors the way things run in the world.

It’s no surprise that we all have a little government operating in our heads. The mind is the government that sets the rules, and the physical body follows those rules. We’re willing to pay real penalties for breaking the rules we put in place—and, very often, we make someone else pay as well. Like most governments, the mind tries to impose its laws on other bodies.

When we are aware of the way the mind functions, we can alter the way we rule ourselves. When we see how our own little government works, we can change it. We can amend our own laws. Whatever we’re able to imagine for our own sake we can create. We can become better caretakers to our bodies and allow ourselves more freedom of expression. We can end the strict penalties we’ve inflicted on ourselves—penalties that make it impossible to experience the love we deserve.

We all want to be the best humans we can be. We want to contribute to our own personal evolution. We want to know what we’ve been doing wrong and what we could do better. We want our secret questions to be answered and to see how the answers can be applied to our own lives. We’d like to discover what is true.

We can all use a few pearls of wisdom. Wisdom improves our relationship with life, with truth. It allows us to rise above our fears and our common beliefs. It gives us the will to walk through one new door, and then the next.

The journey begins with three essential questions:

 Who am I?

 What is real?

 What is love?