Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. The Mastery of Self (A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom)

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The ancient Toltecs believed that life, as we perceive it, is a dream. We each live in our own Personal Dream, and these come together to form the Dream of the Planet, or the world in which we live.

Most of us strive to live happy and peaceful lives, but the Dream of the Planet is full of mental and emotional traps that can knock us off-balance and keep us bound in a prison of suffering.

In The Mastery of Self Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. teaches that much of our suffering occurs when we forget that we are the architects of our own reality, and we have the power CO change our Dream if we choose. In this book, he offers us the tools to break free from the chains of suffering, including the toughest chains to break - the ones we have created for ourselves.

Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. is a Nagual, a Toltec Master of Transformation. He is a direct descendant of the Toltecs of the Eagle Knight lineage and the son of don Miguel Ruiz. By combining the wisdom of his family's traditions with the knowledge gained from his own personal journey, he now helps others realize their own path to personal freedom. He is the author of The Five Levels ofrittachment and Living a Life of Awareness

Imagine for a moment that you are in a dream.

In this dream, you find yourself at a huge party with thousands of people, where you are the only sober person and everyone else is drunk. The other partygoers are in varying states of intoxication. A few people have had just one or two drinks and are only tipsy; most fall into the realm of general drunkenness; and a handful are so drunk that they are making spectacles of themselves in all sorts of colorful ways. They may even have blacked out, as their actions seem completely out of their control.

Some of the people at this party are your friends and family, some are acquaintances, but most you don't know. You try to talk to a few people, but you quickly realize that their intoxication level has altered their ability to communicate clearly; it has clouded their viewpoint. You also notice that each person is experiencing the party differently, depending on his or her degree of drunkenness, and your interactions change with every drink they consume.

The partygoers range from loud, outgoing, and merry, to shy, quiet, and sullen. As the party rages on, you watch everyone alternate between the two ends of the spectrum: from happy to sad, excited to apathetic. They fight and make up, argue, embrace, and argue again, and you watch as this type of odd behavior repeats itself endlessly in cycles throughout the night. You realize that even though they are drunk, it's not the booze they crave more of, but rather the drama of the party.

As the night continues, your interactions with the partygoers vary from person to person. While some are enjoy-able, others have the potential to quickly turn volatile. Since their perception is clouded, the other partygoers react emotionally to situations that you can see are pure fantasy. For some of them, the dream has become a nightmare.

Most important of all, it's clear that no one at this party knows this is all just a dream.

Then it occurs to you that this is not a new party, but one you've attended before. At one point you were just like them. You went through all the varying degrees of drunkenness, behaving exactly as those around you are now You conversed through the fog of booze, joined the folly of the party, and let the intoxication guide your actions.

**Contents and Sample Pages**