Miguel Ruiz - The Mastery Of Love - A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship

Now we are talking about a completely different Dream of the Planet. It doesn't look like the planet Earth. This is what Jesus called "Heaven on Earth," Buddha called "Nirvana," and Moses called "The Promised Land." It is a place where all of us can live in love because we put our attention on love. We choose to love.

Whatever you call the new Dream, it is still a dream as real or as false as the dream of hell. But now you can choose which dream you want to live in. Now you have the tools in your hands to heal yourself. The question is: What are you going to do with them?

YOU ARE THE FORCE THAT PLAYS WITH YOUR mind and uses your body as its favorite toy to play and have fun with. That is the reason you are here: to play and have fun. We are born with the right to be happy, with the right to enjoy life. We are not here to suffer. Whoever wants to suffer is welcome to suffer, but we don't have to suffer.

Then why do we suffer? Because the whole world suffers, and we make the assumption that suffering is normal. Then we create a belief system to support that "truth." Our religions tell us that we came here to suffer, that life is a valley of tears. Suffer today, have patience, and when you die you will have your reward. Sounds beautiful, but it isn't true.

We choose to suffer because we learned to suffer. If we continue to make the same choices, we will continue to suffer. The Dream of the Planet carries the story of humanity, the evolution of humans, and suffering is the result of human evolution. Humans suffer because we know: We know what we believe, we know all those lies, and because we can't fulfill all those lies, we suffer.

It's not true that you go to hell or to heaven after you die. You live in hell or you live in heaven, but now. Heaven and hell only exist in the level of the mind. If we suffer now, when we die we still suffer, because the mind doesn't die with the brain. The dream continues and when our dream is hell, our brain dies and we are still dreaming in the same hell. The only difference between being dead and being asleep is that when we are sleeping we can awake because we have a brain. When we are dead, we cannot awake because we don't have a brain, but the dream is there.

Heaven or hell is here and now. You don't need to wait to die. If you take responsibility for your own life, for your own actions, then your future is in your hands, and you can live in heaven while the body is alive.

The dream most humans create on this planet is obviously hell. This isn't right or wrong or good or bad, and there is no one to blame. Can we blame our parents? No. They did the best they could when they programmed you as a little child. Their own parents did the same with them: the best they could. If you have children, you couldn't know what else to do either. How can you blame yourself? To become aware doesn't mean you need to blame anyone, or carry guilt for what you have done. How can we carry guilt or blame for a mental disease that is seriously contagious?

You know, everything that exists is perfect. You are perfect just the way you are. That is the truth. You are a master. Even if you master anger and jealousy, your anger and jealousy are perfect. Even if you have a big drama going on in your life, it's perfect, it's beautiful. You can go to a movie like Gone with the Wind and cry for all that drama. Who says that hell is not beautiful? Hell can inspire you. Even hell is perfect, because only perfection exists. Even if you dream hell in your life, you are perfect just the way you are.

It is only knowledge that makes us believe we are not perfect. Knowledge is nothing more than a description of the Dream. The Dream is not real, so knowledge isn't real either. Wherever knowledge comes from, it is only real from one point of perception. Once you shift the perception, it is no longer real. We are never going to find ourselves with our knowledge. In the end that is what we are looking for: to find ourselves, to be ourselves, to live our own life, instead of the life of the Parasite – the life we were programmed to live.

It isn't knowledge that will lead us to ourselves; it is wisdom. We have to make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, because they are not the same.

The main way to use knowledge is to communicate with each other, to agree on what we perceive. Knowledge is the only tool we have to communicate, because humans hardly communicate heart to heart. What is important is how we use our knowledge, because we become the slaves of knowledge and we are no longer free.

Wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge; it has to do with freedom. When you are wise, you are free to use your own mind and run your own life. A healthy mind is free of the Parasite; it is free again the way it was before domestication. When you heal your mind, when you break free of the Dream, you are no longer innocent, but wise. You become just like a child again in many ways, except for one big difference: A child is innocent, and that's why he can fall into suffering and unhappiness. The one who transcends the Dream is wise; that is why she doesn't fall anymore, because now she knows – she also has knowledge of the Dream.

You don't need to accumulate knowledge to become wise; anyone can become wise. Anyone. When you become wise, life becomes easy, because you become who you really are. It's difficult to try to be what you are not, to try to convince yourself and everyone else that you are what you are not. Trying to be what you are not expends all your energy. Being what you are doesn't require any effort.

When you become wise, you don't have to use all those images you created; you don't have to pretend to be something else. You accept yourself the way you are, and the complete acceptance of yourself becomes the complete acceptance of everyone else. You no longer try to change other people or impose your point of view. You respect other people's beliefs. You accept your body and your own humanity with all the instincts of your body. There is nothing wrong with being an animal. We are animals, and animals always follow their instinct. We are humans, and because we are so intelligent, we learn to repress our instincts; we don't listen to what comes from the heart. That's why we go against our own body and try to repress the needs of the body or deny they exist. This is not wise.

When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head. You no longer sabotage yourself, your own happiness, or your own love. You no longer carry all that guilt and blame; you no longer have all those judgments against yourself, and you no longer judge anyone else. From that moment on, all the beliefs that make you unhappy, that push you to struggle in life, that make your life difficult, just vanish.

Surrender all those ideas about being what you are not, and become what you really are. When you surrender to your nature, to what you really are, you no longer suffer. When you surrender to the real you, you surrender to Life, you surrender to God. Once you surrender, there is no longer a struggle, there is no resistance, there is no suffering.

Being wise, you always go for the easy way, which is to be yourself, whatever you are. Suffering is nothing but resistance to God. The more you resist, the more you suffer. It is simple.

Imagine that from one day to another, you awake from the Dream and you are completely healthy. You no longer have wounds, you no longer have emotional poison. Imagine the freedom you are going to experience. Everything is going to make you happy just to be alive, wherever you go. Why? Because the healthy human being is not afraid to express love. You are not afraid to be alive, and you are not afraid to love. Imagine how you would live your life, how you would treat the people you are close to, if you no longer had those wounds and that poison in your emotional body.