In The Voice of Knowledge, Ruiz conceives of emotions as an effect (rather than a cause) and genuine (rather than false).  What?  Let’s take the example of a dog.  A dog does not know that he is a dog.  He is just living his life (as we did as children before the voice of knowledge entered our lives).  Let’s say that you come home every day and pet the dog, feed the dog, walk the dog, and hug the dog.  The dog will mature as a dog that is affable, fun-loving, and positively responsive.  Let’s say that instead when you come home in an angry state, you kick the dog, you beat the dog, and you ignore the dog.  The dog will live in fear, might bite you, or run away.  Are the emotions that the dog is feeling genuine or false?  They are genuine, real emotions that are in response to an external cause.  

This analogy will help you understand that when we respond in a certain way, our emotions are real and authentic.  However, they are an effect that we may not want to have, e.g., anger, envy, hatred, etc.  They are an effect that must have a cause.  The cause (if we are talking about a negative cause) is the cause that is created by our telling each other lies and not being true to ourselves.  If we live by the four agreements (be impeccable with your word; don’t take anything personally; don’t make assumptions; and always do your best), we will be free of the cause and thereby free of the effect.  If someone tells you his or her lie that you are not good enough, you might respond naturally with self-pity, hatred toward the other person, etc.  However, if you don’t believe that lie and remain free of the emotional poison that is leveled at you, then you will not suffer a negative emotional effect.  Tomorrow, we will end our discussion with how do we begin to escape the unwanted causes so that we don’t have unwanted effects obviously with reference to the four agreements as the bedrock source material.

Ruiz imagines that our lives are a dream and that we tell our stories of our life through imagining how we want to live that life.  In essence, we are our own creators of our story like an artist.  Ruiz’s grandfather presents the scenario that Ruiz asks Pablo Picasso to paint a portrait of him:  ”When you see it finally, you say, ‘That’s not me.  It does not look like me.’  Picasso replies, ‘But, of course, that is how I see you.’” We are all artists creating our own imagined story.  If we see ourselves as an artist creating our story, then we do not have issues with someone else telling us that our story should be so and so.  We create our own story based on our own perception.

However, sometimes we create a false story because we do not see the truth of ourselves or refuse to do so.  We believe our own lies and we believe the lies that others tell of us.  How do we begin to tell an authentic story of ourselves?  How do we scrub away the voice of knowledge so that we see ourselves without the dense fog of mitote?  The answer is straightforward but not easy:  we follow the four agreements outlined last week.  We stay impeccable with our word; we do not take anything personally; we do not make assumptions; and we always do our best (not more and not less).

When we start living by the principles of the four agreements, we start to see the obvious qualities of the lies that we tell ourselves and we see how others lie about us.  If we remain impeccable with our word, we approach a condition in which we cannot lie to ourselves because it is against our very nature.  The voice of knowledge that tells us that we are not worthy or when someone else screams that to us must be gently erased through the process of self awareness.  If we remain impeccable with our word, we become authentic and truthful.  The greatest lie that we tell is not one told to others, it is the one that we tell ourselves every day.  What is that lie?  Once you start living by the four agreements, you will start to see your own lies and begin to free yourself from those lies.  You start to become an authentic individual, unfettered by the shackles of our own self-imposed hell.  We become the perfect creatures that God created and reflect His light.  We stop becoming a product of our own untruth.  Tomorrow, we will investigate how emotions play in our lives and how we should perceive emotions in our lives.

I would like to thank Emina, emotional coach and hair transplant coordinator extraordinaire, for getting me to read The Voice of Knowledge, Ruiz’s “sequel” if you will to The Four Agreements.  The information presented in this week’s blogs is not as structured as last week’s but should be thought of as important refinements in the thinking presented from understanding and implementing the four agreements into our life.

The title, The Voice of Knowledge, comes from the biblical tale of Adam and Eve, which opens the book.  Without a detailed retelling of a well-known story, we can recount it in brief as an anchor for this blog.  Adam and Eve were told by God not to eat from the tree of knowledge which contained the knowledge of good and evil.  The fallen angel, Satan, in the guise of a serpent tempted humankind to partake of the forbidden fruit, which opened their eyes to their own faults and thereby unleashed a pandora’s box for the remainder of humanity.

Original sin, as Ruiz conceives of it, is not sex but our own self-directed lies about ourselves.  We tell ourselves, “I am not worthy.”; “I am stupid.”; and “I will fail.”  In short, we believe our own lies.  The voice of knowledge is the voice of our own lies.  Take it this way:  when we were children and did not have the knowledge imparted to us of our own limitations, we did not know any better. We did not have knowledge of such things.  We were invincible.  Slowly, with the lies that we tell ourselves and the lies that others tell of us, we begin to gain knowledge that is in essence a lie.  We begin to focus on our imperfections and we begin to subscribe to those limitations.

Ruiz’s grandfather, a Toltec shaman, instilled in Ruiz that he was perfect, as God created him to be.  That the imperfections he saw in himself were a manifestation of lies that he told himself and that others told of him.  Our gradual acceptance of these limitations begins to force us to view ourselves in this said manner and it clouds our ability to see clearly.  The mitote, or fog, we talked about last week comes from a thousand voices telling us how we should behave or what they think of us.  When all that really matters is getting to our true voice of how we should see ourselves.  This week’s blogs will focus on getting us to see our real selves without the layers that we add through years of listening to the voice of knowledge.  Tomorrow’s blog is on viewing ourselves as artists and how to tell our story.