Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

Just finished reading the Four Agreements by Manuel Ruiz.  It’s a nice short book.  In case you haven’t read it, the four agreements are:

• Be impeccable with your word
• Never take anything personally.  (I liked this one best.)
• Dont make assumptions
• Always do your best 

The book has a couple big concepts that are worth remembering:

• “The Dream of the Planet” (miyote) is the set of beliefs that everyone has that we learn after birth.  The dream of the planet is described as being a hostile, arbitrary set of rules that we often feel in conflict with.
• Judge/Victim: Inside our selves we carry with us a “Judge” and a “Victim”.  The judge is an internal voice which is essentially a copy of discipline and punishment handed out by our parents when we were young, and the Victim is the part of us that suffers this.  One of the purposes of the four agreements is to get away from the influence of the Judge so we can live our own authentic dream.
• The Angel of Death: Facing death allows us to be ourselves, because we just don’t have the time to try to please everyone else.

This is a very timely book, because of the journey that I’ve been on the last several years.  In many ways, the struggle and transformation of my life in the last year have been about the balance between pleasing others and doing what is right for myself.  The biggest conflicts I have now (band, marriage, company) are about defining roles in relation to other people.

I’ve been lucky in the last couple of years to experience a large amount of personal freedom and have been able to pretty much do what I want.  Before this period I did what I had to in order to survive, which pretty much boiled down to pleasing other people, whether they were parents, teachers, or employers.  Not having to go around pleasing other people left me disconnected and often lonely.  I’m now convinced that the need for attention and validation is very strong.  Last year, I found myself experimenting with my image in many ways in order to get attention from other people, and it has pretty much worked, though there are ways that these changes did not really fit or represent me.

This brings me to the fundamental problem I think we all face: the fundamental dilemma of love.  In a nutshell it is this:

• I have a certain amount of love to give
• But I don’t love all people equally
• I decide how much of my love to give more or less by how other people appear to me (in the broad sense of appearance)
• Other people can control how much I love them by changing their appearance.
• I also want to be loved
• It’s possible for me to get more or less love by changing my image
• If I change our image too much, I begin to feel that people love the image I have created and not the “real” me, which doesn’t feel good

It’s this last point which the four agreements tries to address - we reach a point in our lives when we begin to feel that we are just a collection of behaviours which mask our true self.

The Dilemma of True Love is that I love other people for how they appear to me, but I want to be loved for my true self and not for my appearance.

As I can see it there are three ways out of this dilemma:

• Madonna’s solution: Accept that love is superficial and move on - that is let go of the need to be loved for my true self.  Since I need love, this would mean optimizing my appearance.
• Jesus’s solution: Learn to love people regardless of their appearance, and then teach this to other people.
• Office Space solution: Always put out 100% of my true self.  Recognize that not all people with love it, but that there are 4billion people on the planet, so some of them probably will.

The trick with the last one is to know the difference between image and appearance.  Learning to wipe ones ass is not an intrisic behavior, but I don’t resent people for appreciating it.  It’s really the dark parts of our persona that we try to hide from others that cause the real discomfort - feelings of anger, boredom, lust or irritation that we learn to mask for the sake of our image.  Maybe it’s when we are at odds with our image that this becomes the problem.

There’s a real skill at knowing when you are hiding something from other people and having the guts to be open about it.  I had a recent experience with a psychotherapist where I knew I was on to something when I became aware that I was hiding things from her.  In a large part, I was also avoiding thinking about these things as well.

Maybe it would be educational for a week to try an experiment in extreme honesty and see where things wind up…

j