Breaking Old Agreements

You are being pro­vid­ed with a book chap­ter by chap­ter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chap­ter. After read­ing the chap­ter, 1. short­en the chap­ter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any impor­tant nouns in the chap­ter. 3. Do not trans­late the orig­i­nal lan­guage. 4. Keep the same style as the orig­i­nal chap­ter, keep it con­sis­tent through­out the chap­ter. Your reply must com­ply with all four require­ments, or it’s invalid.
I will pro­vide the chap­ter now.

6
THE TOLTEC PATH TO FREEDOM

Break­ing Old Agree­ments

EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT FREEDOM. ALL AROUND the world
dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent races, dif­fer­ent coun­tries are fight­ing for
free­dom. But what is free­dom? In Amer­i­ca we speak of liv­ing in a
free coun­try. But are we real­ly free? Are we free to be who we real­ly
are? The answer is no, we are not free. True free­dom has to do with
the human spir­it — it is the free­dom to be who we real­ly are.
Who stops us from being free? We blame the gov­ern­ment, we
blame the weath­er, we blame our par­ents, we blame reli­gion, we
blame God. Who real­ly stops us from being free? We stop our­selves.
What does it real­ly mean to be free? Some­times we get mar­ried and
we say that we lose our free­dom, then we get divorced and we are
still not free. What stops us? Why can’t we be our­selves?
We have mem­o­ries of long ago, when we used to be free and we
loved being free, but we have for­got­ten what free­dom real­ly means.
If we see a child who is two or three, per­haps four years old, we
find a free human. Why is this human free? Because this human
does what­ev­er he or she wants to do. The human is com­plete­ly wild.
Just like a flower, a tree, or an ani­mal that has not been
domes­ti­cat­ed — wild! And if we observe humans who are two years
old, we find that most of the time these humans have a big smile on
their face and they’re hav­ing fun. They are explor­ing the world. They
are not afraid to play. They are afraid when they are hurt, when they
are hun­gry, when some of their needs are not met, but they don’t
wor­ry about the past, don’t care about the future, and only live in the
present moment.
Very young chil­dren are not afraid to express what they feel. They
are so lov­ing that if they per­ceive love, they melt into love. They are
not afraid to love at all. That is the descrip­tion of a nor­mal human
being. As chil­dren we are not afraid of the future or ashamed of the
past. Our nor­mal human ten­den­cy is to enjoy life, to play, to explore,
to be hap­py, and to love.
But, what has hap­pened with the adult human? Why are we so
dif­fer­ent? Why are we not wild? From the point of view of the Vic­tim
we can say that some­thing sad hap­pened to us, and from the point
of view of the war­rior we can say that what hap­pened to us is
nor­mal. What has hap­pened is that we have the Book of Law, the big
Judge and the Vic­tim who rule our lives. We are no longer free
because the Judge, the Vic­tim, and the belief sys­tem don’t allow us
to be who we real­ly are. Once our minds have been pro­grammed
with all that garbage, we are no longer hap­py.
This chain of train­ing from human to human, from gen­er­a­tion to
gen­er­a­tion, is per­fect­ly nor­mal in human soci­ety. You don’t need to
blame your par­ents for teach­ing you to be like them. What else could
they teach you but what they know? They did the best they could,
and if they abused you, it was due to their own domes­ti­ca­tion, their
own fears, their own beliefs. They had no con­trol over the
pro­gram­ming they received, so they couldn’t have behaved any
dif­fer­ent­ly.
There is no need to blame your par­ents or any­one who abused
you in your life, includ­ing your­self. But it is time to stop the abuse. It
is time to free your­self of the tyran­ny of the Judge by chang­ing the
foun­da­tion of your own agree­ments. It is time to be free from the role
of the Vic­tim.
The real you is still a lit­tle child who nev­er grew up. Some­times
that lit­tle child comes out when you are hav­ing fun or play­ing, when
you feel hap­py, when you are paint­ing, or writ­ing poet­ry, or play­ing
the piano, or express­ing your­self in some way. These are the
hap­pi­est moments of your life — when the real you comes out, when
you don’t care about the past and you don’t wor­ry about the future.
You are child­like.
But there is some­thing that changes all that: We call them
respon­si­bil­i­ties. The Judge says, “Wait a sec­ond, you are
respon­si­ble, you have things to do, you have to work, you have to go
to school, you have to earn a liv­ing.” All these respon­si­bil­i­ties come
to mind. Our face changes and becomes seri­ous again. If you watch
chil­dren when they are play­ing adults, you will see their lit­tle faces
change. “Let’s pre­tend I’m a lawyer,” and right away their faces
change; the adult face takes over. We go to court and that is the face
we see — and that is what we are. We are still chil­dren, but we have
lost our free­dom.
The free­dom we are look­ing for is the free­dom to be our­selves, to
express our­selves. But if we look at our lives we will see that most of
the time we do things just to please oth­ers, just to be accept­ed by
oth­ers, rather than liv­ing our lives to please our­selves. That is what
has hap­pened to our free­dom. And we see in our soci­ety and all the
soci­eties around the world, that for every thou­sand peo­ple, nine
hun­dred and nine­ty-nine are com­plete­ly domes­ti­cat­ed.
The worst part is that most of us are not even aware that we are
not free. There is some­thing inside that whis­pers to us that we are
not free, but we do not under­stand what it is, and why we are not
free.
The prob­lem with most peo­ple is that they live their lives and nev­er
dis­cov­er that the Judge and the Vic­tim rule their mind, and there­fore
they don’t have a chance to be free. The first step toward per­son­al
free­dom is aware­ness. We need to be aware that we are not free in
order to be free. We need to be aware of what the prob­lem is in
order to solve the prob­lem.
Aware­ness is always the first step because if you are not aware,
there is noth­ing you can change. If you are not aware that your mind
is full of wounds and emo­tion­al poi­son, you can­not begin to clean
and heal the wounds and you will con­tin­ue to suf­fer.
There is no rea­son to suf­fer. With aware­ness you can rebel and
say, “This is enough!” You can look for a way to heal and trans­form
your per­son­al dream. The dream of the plan­et is just a dream. It is
not even real. If you go into the dream and start chal­leng­ing your
beliefs, you will find that most of the beliefs that guid­ed you into the
wound­ed mind are not even true. You will find that you suf­fered all
those years of dra­ma for noth­ing. Why? Because the belief sys­tem
that was put inside your mind is based on lies.
That is why it is impor­tant for you to mas­ter your own dream; that
is why the Toltecs became dream mas­ters. Your life is the
man­i­fes­ta­tion of your dream; it is an art. And you can change your
life any­time if you aren’t enjoy­ing the dream. Dream mas­ters cre­ate
a mas­ter­piece of life; they con­trol the dream by mak­ing choic­es.
Every­thing has con­se­quences and a dream mas­ter is aware of the
con­se­quences.
To be Toltec is a way of life. It is a way of life where there are no
lead­ers and no fol­low­ers, where you have your own truth and live
your own truth. A Toltec becomes wise, becomes wild, and becomes
free again.
There are three mas­ter­ies that lead peo­ple to become Toltecs.
First is the Mas­tery of Aware­ness. This is to be aware of who we
real­ly are, with all the pos­si­bil­i­ties. The sec­ond is the Mas­tery of
Trans­for­ma­tion — how to change, how to be free of domes­ti­ca­tion.
The third is the Mas­tery of Intent. Intent from the Toltec point of view
is that part of life that makes trans­for­ma­tion of ener­gy pos­si­ble; it is
the one liv­ing being that seam­less­ly encom­pass­es all ener­gy, or
what we call “God.” Intent is life itself; it is uncon­di­tion­al love. The
Mas­tery of Intent is there­fore the Mas­tery of Love.
When we talk about the Toltec path to free­dom, we find that they
have an entire map for break­ing free of domes­ti­ca­tion. They
com­pare the Judge, the Vic­tim, and the belief sys­tem to a par­a­site
that invades the human mind. From the Toltec point of view, all
humans who are domes­ti­cat­ed are sick. They are sick because there
is a par­a­site that con­trols the mind and con­trols the brain. The food
for the par­a­site is the neg­a­tive emo­tions that come from fear.
If we look at the descrip­tion of a par­a­site, we find that a par­a­site is
a liv­ing being who lives off of oth­er liv­ing beings, suck­ing their
ener­gy with­out any use­ful con­tri­bu­tion in return, and hurt­ing their
host lit­tle by lit­tle. The Judge, the Vic­tim, and the belief sys­tem fit this
descrip­tion very well. Togeth­er they com­prise a liv­ing being made of
psy­chic or emo­tion­al ener­gy, and that ener­gy is alive. Of course it is
not mate­r­i­al ener­gy, but nei­ther are emo­tions mate­r­i­al ener­gy. Our
dreams are not mate­r­i­al ener­gy either, but we know they exist.
One func­tion of the brain is to trans­form mate­r­i­al ener­gy into
emo­tion­al ener­gy. Our brain is the fac­to­ry of the emo­tions. And we
have said that the main func­tion of the mind is to dream. The Toltecs
believe that the par­a­site — the Judge, the Vic­tim, and the belief
sys­tem — has con­trol of your mind; it con­trols your per­son­al dream.
The par­a­site dreams through your mind and lives its life through your
body. It sur­vives on the emo­tions that come from fear, and thrives on
dra­ma and suf­fer­ing.
The free­dom we seek is to use our own mind and body, to live our
own life, instead of the life of the belief sys­tem. When we dis­cov­er
that the mind is con­trolled by the Judge and the Vic­tim and the real
“us” is in the cor­ner, we have just two choic­es. One choice is to keep
liv­ing the way we are, to sur­ren­der to the Judge and the Vic­tim, to
keep liv­ing in the dream of the plan­et. The sec­ond choice is to do
what we do as chil­dren when par­ents try to domes­ti­cate us. We can
rebel and say “No!” We can declare a war against the par­a­site, a war
against the Judge and the Vic­tim, a war for our inde­pen­dence, a war
for the right to use our own mind and our own brain.
That is why in all the shaman­ic tra­di­tions in Amer­i­ca, from Cana­da
to Argenti­na, peo­ple call them­selves war­riors, because they are in a
war against the par­a­site in the mind. That is the real mean­ing of a
war­rior. The war­rior is one who rebels against the inva­sion of the
par­a­site. The war­rior rebels and declares a war. But to be a war­rior
doesn’t mean we always win the war; we may win or we may lose,
but we always do our best and at least we have a chance to be free
again. Choos­ing this path gives us, at the very least, the dig­ni­ty of
rebel­lion, and ensures that we will not be the help­less vic­tim of our
own whim­si­cal emo­tions or the poi­so­nous emo­tions of oth­ers. Even
if we suc­cumb to the ene­my — the par­a­site — we will not be among
those vic­tims who would not fight back.
At best, being a war­rior gives us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to tran­scend the
dream of the plan­et, and to change our per­son­al dream to a dream
that we call heav­en. Just like hell, heav­en is a place that exists with­in
our mind. It is a place of joy, a place where we are hap­py, where we
are free to love and to be who we real­ly are. We can reach heav­en
while we are alive; we don’t have to wait until we die. God is always
present and the king­dom of heav­en is every­where, but first we need
to have the eyes and ears to see and hear that truth. We need to be
free of the par­a­site.
The par­a­site can be com­pared to a mon­ster with a thou­sand
heads. Every head of the par­a­site is one of the fears that we have. If
we want to be free, we have to destroy the par­a­site. One solu­tion is
to attack the par­a­site head by head, which means we face each of
our fears, one by one. This is a slow process, but it works. Every
time we face one of the fears we are a lit­tle more free.
A sec­ond approach is to stop feed­ing the par­a­site. If we don’t give
the par­a­site any food, we kill the par­a­site by star­va­tion. To do this we
have to gain con­trol of our emo­tions, we have to refrain from fuel­ing
the emo­tions that come from fear. This is easy to say, but it is very
dif­fi­cult to do. It is dif­fi­cult because the Judge and the Vic­tim con­trol
our mind.
A third solu­tion is called the ini­ti­a­tion of the dead. The ini­ti­a­tion of
the dead is found in many tra­di­tions and eso­teric schools around the
world. We find it in Egypt, India, Greece, and Amer­i­ca. This is a
sym­bol­ic death which kills the par­a­site with­out harm­ing our phys­i­cal
body. When we “die” sym­bol­i­cal­ly the par­a­site has to die. This is
faster than the first two solu­tions, but it is even more dif­fi­cult to do.
We need a great deal of courage to face the angel of death. We
need to be very strong.
Let’s take a clos­er look at each of these solu­tions.

THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION:
THE DREAM OF THE SECOND ATTENTION
We have learned that the dream you are liv­ing now is the result of
the out­side dream hook­ing your atten­tion and feed­ing you all of your
beliefs. The process of domes­ti­ca­tion can be called the dream of the
first atten­tion because it was how your atten­tion was used for the
first time to cre­ate the first dream of your life.
One way to change your beliefs is to focus your atten­tion on all
those agree­ments and beliefs, and change the agree­ments with
your­self. In doing this you are using your atten­tion for the sec­ond
time, thus cre­at­ing the dream of the sec­ond atten­tion or the new
dream.
The dif­fer­ence is that you are no longer inno­cent. When you were
a child this was not true; you didn’t have a choice. But you are no
longer a child. Now it’s up to you to choose what to believe and what
not to believe. You can choose to believe in any­thing, and that
includes believ­ing in your­self.
The first step is to become aware of the fog that is in your mind.
You must become aware that you are dream­ing all the time. Only
with aware­ness do you have the pos­si­bil­i­ty of trans­form­ing your
dream. If you have the aware­ness that the whole dra­ma of your life
is the result of what you believe, and what you believe is not real,
then you can begin to change it. How­ev­er, to real­ly change your
beliefs you need to focus your atten­tion on what it is that you want to
change. You have to know which agree­ments you want to change
before you can change them.
So the next step is to devel­op aware­ness of all the self-lim­it­ing,
fear-based beliefs that make you unhap­py. You take an inven­to­ry of
all that you believe, all your agree­ments, and through this process
you begin the trans­for­ma­tion. The Toltecs called this the Art of
Trans­for­ma­tion, and it’s a whole mas­tery. You achieve the Mas­tery of
Trans­for­ma­tion by chang­ing the fear-based agree­ments that make
you suf­fer, and repro­gram­ming your own mind, in your own way. One
of the ways to do this is to explore and adopt alter­na­tive beliefs such
as the Four Agree­ments.
The deci­sion to adopt the Four Agree­ments is a dec­la­ra­tion of war
to regain your free­dom from the par­a­site. The Four Agree­ments offer
the pos­si­bil­i­ty of end­ing the emo­tion­al pain, which can open the door
for you to enjoy your life and begin a new dream. It’s up to you to
explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of your dream, if you are inter­est­ed. The
Four Agree­ments were cre­at­ed to assist you in the Art of
Trans­for­ma­tion, to help you break the lim­it­ing agree­ments, gain more
per­son­al pow­er, and become stronger. The stronger you get, the
more agree­ments you can break until the moment comes when you
make it to the core of all of those agree­ments.
Going to the core of those agree­ments is what I call going into the
desert. When you go into the desert you meet your demons face-to-
face. After com­ing out of the desert, all those demons become
angels.
Prac­tic­ing the four new agree­ments is a big act of pow­er. Break­ing
the spell of black mag­ic in your mind requires great per­son­al pow­er.
Every time you break an agree­ment, you gain extra pow­er. You start
by break­ing agree­ments that are very small and require less pow­er.
As those small­er agree­ments are bro­ken, your per­son­al pow­er will
increase until you reach a point when you can final­ly face the big
demons in your mind.
For exam­ple, the lit­tle girl who was told not to sing is now twen­ty
years old and she still does not sing. One way she can over­come the
belief that her voice is ugly is to say, “Okay, I will try to sing, even if I
do sing bad­ly.” Then she can pre­tend that some­one is clap­ping and
telling her, “Oh! That was beau­ti­ful.” This may break the agree­ment a
tee­ny, tiny bit, but it will still be there. How­ev­er, now she has a lit­tle
more pow­er and courage to try again and again until final­ly she
breaks the agree­ment.
That’s one way out of the dream of hell. But for every agree­ment
you break that makes you suf­fer, you will need to replace it with a
new agree­ment that makes you hap­py. This will keep the old
agree­ment from com­ing back. If you occu­py the same space with a
new agree­ment, then the old agree­ment is gone for­ev­er and in its
place is the new agree­ment.
There are many strong beliefs in the mind that can make this
process look hope­less. This is why you need to go step-by-step and
be patient with your­self because this is a slow process. The way you
are liv­ing now is the result of many years of domes­ti­ca­tion. You
can­not expect to break the domes­ti­ca­tion in one day. Break­ing
agree­ments is very dif­fi­cult because we put the pow­er of the word
(which is the pow­er of our will) into every agree­ment we have made.
We need the same amount of pow­er to change an agree­ment. We
can­not change an agree­ment with less pow­er than we used to make
the agree­ment, and almost all our per­son­al pow­er is invest­ed in
keep­ing the agree­ments we have with our­selves. That’s because our
agree­ments are actu­al­ly like a strong addic­tion. We are addict­ed to
being the way we are. We are addict­ed to anger, jeal­ousy, and self-
pity. We are addict­ed to the beliefs that tell us, “I’m not good enough,
I’m not intel­li­gent enough. Why even try? Oth­er peo­ple will do it
because they’re bet­ter than me.”
All of these old agree­ments which rule our dream of life are the
result of repeat­ing them over and over again. There­fore, to adopt the
Four Agree­ments, you need to put rep­e­ti­tion in action. Prac­tic­ing the
new agree­ments in your life is how your best becomes bet­ter.
Rep­e­ti­tion makes the mas­ter.

THE DISCIPLINE OF THE WARRIOR:
CONTROLLING YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR
Imag­ine that you awake ear­ly one morn­ing over­flow­ing with
enthu­si­asm for the day. You feel good. You are hap­py and have
plen­ty of ener­gy to face the day. Then at break­fast, you have a big
fight with your spouse, and a flood of emo­tion comes out. You get
mad, and in the emo­tion of anger you spend a lot of per­son­al pow­er.
After the fight, you feel drained, and you just want to go and cry. In
fact, you feel so tired that you go to your room, col­lapse, and try to
recov­er. You spend the day wrapped up in your emo­tions. You have
no ener­gy to keep going, and you just want to walk away from
every­thing.
Every day we awake with a cer­tain amount of men­tal, emo­tion­al,
and phys­i­cal ener­gy that we spend through­out the day. If we allow
our emo­tions to deplete our ener­gy, we have no ener­gy to change
our lives or to give to oth­ers.
The way you see the world will depend upon the emo­tions you are
feel­ing. When you are angry, every­thing around you is wrong,
noth­ing is right. You blame every­thing includ­ing the weath­er; whether
it’s rain­ing or the sun is shin­ing, noth­ing pleas­es you. When you are
sad, every­thing around you is sad and makes you cry. You see the
trees and you feel sad; you see the rain and every­thing looks so sad.
Per­haps you feel vul­ner­a­ble and have a need to pro­tect your­self
because you don’t know in what moment some­one will attack you.
You do not trust any­thing or any­one around you. This is because you
see the world with the eyes of fear!
Imag­ine that the human mind is the same as your skin. You can
touch healthy skin and it feels won­der­ful. Your skin is made for
per­cep­tion and the sen­sa­tion of touch is won­der­ful. Now imag­ine you
have an injury and the skin gets cut and infect­ed. If you touch the
infect­ed skin, it is going to hurt, so you try to cov­er and pro­tect the
skin. You will not enjoy being touched because it hurts.
Now imag­ine that all humans have this skin dis­ease. Nobody can
touch each oth­er because it is going to hurt. Every­one has wounds
on their skin, so the infec­tion is seen as nor­mal, the pain is also
con­sid­ered nor­mal; we believe we are sup­posed to be that way.
Can you imag­ine how we would behave with each oth­er if all the
humans in the world had this skin dis­ease? Of course we would
hard­ly ever hug each oth­er because it would be too painful. So we
would need to cre­ate a lot of dis­tance between us.
The human mind is exact­ly like this descrip­tion of infect­ed skin.
Every human has an emo­tion­al body com­plete­ly cov­ered with
infect­ed wounds. Each wound is infect­ed with emo­tion­al poi­son —
the poi­son of all the emo­tions that makes us suf­fer, such as hate,
anger, envy, and sad­ness. An action of injus­tice opens a wound in
the mind and we react with emo­tion­al poi­son because of the
con­cepts and beliefs we have about injus­tice and what is fair. The
mind is so wound­ed and full of poi­son by the process of
domes­ti­ca­tion, that every­one describes the wound­ed mind as
nor­mal. This is con­sid­ered nor­mal, but I can tell you it is not nor­mal.
We have a dys­func­tion­al dream of the plan­et, and humans are
men­tal­ly sick with a dis­ease called fear. The symp­toms of the
dis­ease are all the emo­tions that make humans suf­fer: anger, hate,
sad­ness, envy, and betray­al. When the fear is too great, the
rea­son­ing mind begins to fail, and we call this men­tal ill­ness.
Psy­chot­ic behav­ior occurs when the mind is so fright­ened and the
wounds so painful, that it seems bet­ter to break con­tact with the
out­side world.
If we can see our state of mind as a dis­ease, we find there is a
cure. We don’t have to suf­fer any longer. First we need the truth to
open the emo­tion­al wounds, take the poi­son out, and heal the
wounds com­plete­ly. How do we do this? We must for­give those we
feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be for­giv­en, but
because we love our­selves so much we don’t want to keep pay­ing
for the injus­tice.
For­give­ness is the only way to heal. We can choose to for­give
because we feel com­pas­sion for our­selves. We can let go of the
resent­ment and declare, “That’s enough! I will no longer be the big
Judge that goes against myself. I will no longer beat myself up and
abuse myself. I will no longer be the Vic­tim.”
First, we need to for­give our par­ents, our broth­ers, our sis­ters, our
friends, and God. Once you for­give God, you can final­ly for­give
your­self. Once you for­give your­self, the self-rejec­tion in your mind is
over. Self-accep­tance begins, and the self-love will grow so strong
that you will final­ly accept your­self just the way you are. That’s the
begin­ning of the free human. For­give­ness is the key.
You will know you have for­giv­en some­one when you see them and
you no longer have an emo­tion­al reac­tion. You will hear the name of
the per­son and you will have no emo­tion­al reac­tion. When some­one
can touch what used to be a wound and it no longer hurts you, then
you know you have tru­ly for­giv­en.
The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful, because it opens all
of the wounds which are cov­ered by lies so that we can be healed.
These lies are what we call the denial sys­tem. It’s a good thing we
have the denial sys­tem, because it allows us to cov­er our wounds
and still func­tion. But once we no longer have any wounds or any
poi­son, we don’t need to lie any­more. We don’t need the denial
sys­tem, because a healthy mind, like healthy skin, can be touched
with­out hurt­ing. It’s plea­sur­able for the mind to be touched when it is
clean.
The prob­lem with most peo­ple is that they lose con­trol of their
emo­tions. It is the emo­tions that con­trol the behav­ior of the human,
not the human who con­trols the emo­tions. When we lose con­trol we
say things that we don’t want to say, and do things that we don’t
want to do. That is why it is so impor­tant to be impec­ca­ble with our
word and to become a spir­i­tu­al war­rior. We must learn to con­trol the
emo­tions so we have enough per­son­al pow­er to change our fear-
based agree­ments, escape from hell, and cre­ate our own per­son­al
heav­en.
How are we to become a war­rior? There are cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics
of the war­rior that are near­ly the same around the world. The war­rior
has aware­ness. That’s very impor­tant. We are aware that we are at
war, and the war in our minds requires dis­ci­pline. Not the dis­ci­pline
of a sol­dier, but the dis­ci­pline of a war­rior. Not the dis­ci­pline from the
out­side to tell us what to do and what not to do, but the dis­ci­pline to
be our­selves, no mat­ter what.
The war­rior has con­trol. Not con­trol over anoth­er human, but
con­trol over one’s own emo­tions, con­trol over one’s own self. It is
when we lose con­trol that we repress the emo­tions, not when we are
in con­trol. The big dif­fer­ence between a war­rior and a vic­tim is that
the vic­tim repress­es, and the war­rior refrains. Vic­tims repress
because they are afraid to show the emo­tions, afraid to say what
they want to say. To refrain is not the same thing as repres­sion. To
refrain is to hold the emo­tions and to express them in the right
moment, not before, not lat­er. That is why war­riors are impec­ca­ble.
They have com­plete con­trol over their own emo­tions and there­fore
over their own behav­ior.

THE INITIATION OF THE DEAD:
EMBRACING THE ANGEL OF DEATH
The final way to attain per­son­al free­dom is to pre­pare our­selves
for the ini­ti­a­tion of the dead, to take death itself as our teacher. What
the angel of death can teach us is how to be tru­ly alive. We become
aware that we can die at any moment; we have just the present to be
alive. The truth is that we don’t know if we are going to die tomor­row.
Who knows? We have the idea that we have many years in the
future. But do we?
If we go to the hos­pi­tal and the doc­tor tells us that we have one
week to live, what are we going to do? As we have said before, we
have two choic­es. One is to suf­fer because we are going to die, and
to tell every­one, “Poor me, I am going to die,” and real­ly cre­ate a
huge dra­ma. The oth­er choice is to use every moment to be hap­py,
to do what we real­ly enjoy doing. If we only have one week to live,
let’s enjoy life. Let’s be alive. We can say, “I’m going to be myself. No
longer am I going to run my life try­ing to please oth­er peo­ple. No
longer am I going to be afraid of what they think about me. What do I
care what oth­ers think if I am going to die in one week? I’m going to
be myself.”
The angel of death can teach us to live every day as if it is the last
day of our lives, as if there may be no tomor­row. We can begin each
day by say­ing, “I am awake, I see the sun. I am going to give my
grat­i­tude to the sun and to every­thing and every­one, because I am
still alive. One more day to be myself.”
That is the way I see life, that is what the angel of death taught me
— to be com­plete­ly open, to know that there is noth­ing to be afraid
of. And of course I treat the peo­ple I love with love because this may
be the last day that I can tell you how much I love you. I don’t know if
I am going to see you again, so I don’t want to fight with you.
What if I had a big fight with you and I told you all those emo­tion­al
poi­sons that I have against you and you die tomor­row? Oops! Oh my
God, the Judge will get me so bad, and I will feel so guilty for
every­thing that I told you. I will even feel guilty for not telling you how
much I love you. The love that makes me hap­py is the love that I can
share with you. Why do I need to deny that I love you? It is not
impor­tant if you love me back. I may die tomor­row or you may die
tomor­row. What makes me hap­py now is to let you know how much I
love you.
You can live your life this way. By doing so, you pre­pare your­self
for the ini­ti­a­tion of death. What is going to hap­pen in the ini­ti­a­tion of
death is that the old dream that you have in your mind is going to die
for­ev­er. Yes, you are going to have mem­o­ries of the par­a­site — of
the Judge, the Vic­tim, and what you used to believe — but the
par­a­site will be dead.
That is what is going to die in the ini­ti­a­tion of death — the par­a­site.
It is not easy to go for the ini­ti­a­tion of death because the Judge and
the Vic­tim will fight with every­thing they have. They don’t want to die.
And we feel we are the ones who are going to die, and we are afraid
of this death.
When we live in the dream of the plan­et, it is as if we are dead.
Who­ev­er sur­vives the ini­ti­a­tion of the dead receives the most
won­der­ful gift: the res­ur­rec­tion. To receive the res­ur­rec­tion is to arise
from the dead, to be alive, to be our­selves again. The res­ur­rec­tion is
to be like a child — to be wild and free, but with a dif­fer­ence. The
dif­fer­ence is that we have free­dom with wis­dom instead of
inno­cence. We are able to break our domes­ti­ca­tion, become free
again, and heal our mind. We sur­ren­der to the angel of death,
know­ing that the par­a­site will die and we will still be alive with a