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

Humans use fear to domesticate humans, and our fear increases with each experience of injustice. The sense of injustice is the knife that opens a wound in our emotional body. Emotional poison is created by our reaction to what we consider injustice. Some wounds will heal, others will become infected with more and more poison. Once we are full of emotional poison, we have the need to release it, and we practice releasing the poison by sending it to someone else. How do we do this? By hooking that person's attention.

Let's take an example of an ordinary couple. For whatever reason, the wife is mad. She has a lot of emotional poison from an injustice that comes from her husband. The husband is not home, but she remembers that injustice and the poison is growing inside. When the husband comes home, the first thing she wants to do is hook his attention because once she hooks his attention, all the poison can go to her husband and she can feel the relief. As soon as she tells him how bad he is, how stupid or how unfair he is, that poison she has inside her is transferred to the husband.

She keeps talking and talking until she gets his attention. The husband finally reacts and gets mad, and she feels better. But now the poison is going through him, and he has to get even. He has to hook her attention and release the poison, but it's not just her poison – it's her poison plus his poison. If you look at this interaction, you will see that they are touching each other's wounds and playing ping-pong with emotional poison. The poison keeps growing and growing, until someday one of them is going to explode. This is often how humans relate with each other.

By hooking the attention, the energy goes from one person to another person. The attention is something very powerful in the human mind. Everyone around the world is hunting the attention of others all the time. When we capture the attention, we create channels of communication. The Dream is transferred, power is transferred, but emotional poison is transferred also.

Usually we release the poison with the person we think is responsible for the injustice, but if that person is so powerful that we cannot send it to him, we don't care who we send it to. We send it to the little ones who have no defense against us, and that is how abusive relationships are formed. The people of power abuse the people who have less power because they need to release their emotional poison. We have the need to release the poison, and sometimes we don't want justice; we just want to release, we want peace. That is why humans are hunting power all the time, because the more powerful we are, the easier it is to release the poison to the ones who cannot defend themselves.

Of course, we are talking about relationships in hell. We are talking about the mental disease that exists on this planet. There is no one to blame for this disease; it is not good or bad or right or wrong; it is simply the normal pathology of this disease. No one is guilty for being abusive. Just as people on that imaginary planet are not guilty because their skin is sick, you are not guilty because you have wounds infected with poison. When you are physically sick or injured, you don't blame yourself or feel guilty. Then why feel bad or feel guilty because your emotional body is sick?

What is important is to have the awareness that we have this problem. If we have the awareness, we have the opportunity to heal our emotional body, our emotional mind, and stop the suffering. Without the awareness, there is nothing we can do. The only thing we can do is to keep suffering from the interaction with other humans, but not just with other humans, the interaction with our own self, because we also touch our own wounds just to be punished.

In our mind we create that part of us that is always judging. The Judge is judging everything we do, everything we don't do, everything we feel, everything we don't feel. We are judging ourselves all the time, and we are judging everyone else all the time, based on what we believe and based on the sense of justice and injustice. Of course, we find ourselves guilty and we need to be punished. The other part of our mind that receives the judgment and has the need to be punished is the Victim. That part of us says, "Poor me. I'm not good enough, I'm not strong enough, I'm not intelligent enough. Why should I try?"

When you were a child, you could not choose what to believe and what not to believe. The Judge and the Victim are based on all those false beliefs you didn't choose. When that information went into your mind, you were innocent. You believed everything. The Belief System was put inside you like a program by the outside Dream. The Toltecs call this program the Parasite. The human mind is sick because it has a Parasite that steals its vital energy and robs it of joy. The Parasite is all those beliefs that make you suffer. Those beliefs are so strong that years later when you learn new concepts and try to make your own decisions, you find those beliefs still control your life.

Sometimes the little child inside you comes out – the real you that stays at the age of two or three years old. You are living in the moment and having fun, but there is something pulling you back; something inside feels unworthy of having too much fun. An inner voice tells you that your happiness is too good to be true; it isn't right to be too happy. All the guilt, all the blame, all the emotional poison in your emotional body keeps pulling you back into the world of drama.

The Parasite spreads like a disease from our grandparents, to our parents, to ourselves, and then we give it to our own children. We put all those programs inside our children the same way we train a dog. Humans are domesticated animals, and this domestication leads us into the dream of hell where we live in fear. The food for the Parasite is the emotions that come from fear. Before we get the Parasite, we enjoy life, we play, we are happy like little children. But after all that garbage is put into our minds, we are no longer happy. We learn to be right and to make everyone else wrong. The need to be "right" is the result of trying to protect the image we want to project to the outside. We have to impose our way of thinking, not just onto other humans, but even upon ourselves.

With awareness we can easily understand why relationships don't work – with our parents, with our children, with our friends, with our partner, and even with ourselves. Why doesn't the relationship with ourselves work? Because we are wounded and we have all that emotional poison that we can hardly handle. We are full of poison because we grew up with an image of perfection that is not true, which does not exist, and in our mind it isn't fair.

We have seen how we create that image of perfection to please other people, even though they create their own dream that has nothing to do with us. We try to please Mom and Dad, we try to please our teacher, our minister, our religion, and God. But the truth is that from their point of view, we are never going to be perfect. That image of perfection tells us how we should be in order to acknowledge that we are good, in order to accept ourselves. But guess what? This is the biggest lie we believe about ourselves, because we are never going to be perfect. And there is no way that we can forgive ourselves for not being perfect.

That image of perfection changes the way we dream. We learn to deny ourselves and reject ourselves. We are never good enough, or right enough, or clean enough, or healthy enough, according to all those beliefs we have. There is always something the Judge can never accept or forgive. That is why we reject our own humanity; that is why we never deserve to be happy; that is why we are searching for someone who abuses us, someone who will punish us. We have a very high level of self-abuse because of that image of perfection.