An abstract from "A Toltec Wisdom Book - The Voice of Knowledge" by Don Miguel Ruiz. Here's a chapter on "Common Sense and Blind Faith" which seems even more relevant in these interesting times we are in.
" Before we learn to speak, our true nature is to love and be happy, to explore and enjoy life. As little children, we are completely authentic. Our actions aare guided by instinct and emotions; we listen to the silent voice of our integrity. Once we learn language, the people around us hook our attention and programme us with knowledge. But that knowledge is contaiminated with lies.
With our attention focused on all the knowledge in our head, we no longer perceive the world through the eyes of love; we only perceive what we have learned to believe. The voice of knowledge comes alive inside our head, and what is that voice telling is? Mostly lies. That voice never stops talking, judging, gossiping, and abusing us. It constantly sabotages our happiness and keeps us from enjoying a reality of truth and love." ~ don Miguel Ruiz
Common Sense And Blind Faith
Recovering our faith and free will
When I started teaching this Philosophy, one of my challenges was to share the wisdom of my tradition without the superstition. I wanted to take away all of the superstition, all of the things about evil and witchcraft from the Toltec tradition. Who cares about all the lies? I wanted to take away the nonsense, and only keep the common sense.
If we take away the superstition and mythology from the traditions around the world, the result is pure common sense. When it comes to common sense, there is no difference between the Toltec tradition, the Egyptian tradition, the Christian tradition, the Buddhist tradition, the Islamic tradition,or any other tradition, because all of these philosophies come from the same place. They come directly from human integrity.
The difference is in the story. Each philosophy has tried to explain with symbols something that is so difficult to say with words. The masters witnessed the truth and created a story, depending on what they believed. The story became mythology, and the people who were not masters created all of the superstition and lies. That is why I don't believe in following gurus or idolizing heroes. We are our own gurus, our own heroes. What I am sharing with you is the way I live my life, but I'm not telling you how to life your life. It's not my business; it's your business. But seeing the way that I dream can give you an idea of what you can do with your dream.
As you read this book, perhaps you will feel as if you are reading something you already know: your own common sense. In one moment, you can return to your common sense, to your own integrity, You can have clarity again, and see what others cannot see. You can live with awareness and recover a wonderful power that humans gave up long ago : faith.
Faith is a force that comes from our integrity. It is the expression of what we really are. Faith is the power of our creation because we use faith to create our life story and to transform our life story. Different traditions have called this power by different names. The Toltec call it intent, but I prefer to call it faith.
Let's see if we can understand why our faith is so important. When we talk about faith or intent, we are also talking about the power of the word. The word is pure magic. It is a power that comes directly from God, and faith is the force that directs this power. We can say that everything in our virtual reality is created with the word because we use the word for the creation of our story. Humans have the most wonderful imagination. Beginning with the word, we form a language. With a language, we try to make sense out of everything we experience.
First we agree about the sound and meaning of each word. Then just by remembering the sound of the words, we can communicate with other dreamers about our virtual reality. We give names to everything we perceive; we choose words as symbols, and these symbols have the power to reproduce a dream in our head. For example, just hearing the word horse can reproduce an entire image in our mind. That's how a symbol works. But it can even be more powerful than that. Just by saying two words, "The Godfather", a whole movie can appear in our mind. The word, as a symbol, has the magic and power of creation because it can reproduce an image, a concept, or an entire situation in our imagination.
It is amazing what the word can do. The word creates images of objects in our mind. The word creates complex concepts. The word evokes feelings. The word creates every belief that we store in our mind. The structure of our language shapes how we perceive our entire virtual reality.
Faith is so important because it is the force that gives life to every word, to every concept that we store in our mind. We can say that life manifests through faith, and that faith is a messenger of life. Life goes through our faith, and then our faith gives life to everything we agree to believe in. Remember, we invest our faith by making an agreement. When we agree with a concept, we accept that concept without any doubt, and the concept becomes a part of us. If we don't agree with a concept, our faith is not there, and we don't keep it in our memory. Every concept is alive just because our faith is there, just because we believe in the concept. Faith is the force that holds all of these symbols together amd gives sense and direction to the entire dream.
If you can imagine that every belief, every concept, every opinion is like a brick, then our faith is the mortar that holds the bricks together. The way we start getting these bricks and putting them together is by using our attention. Humans can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but with our attention we have the power to discriminate and focus only on what we want to perceive. The attention is also the part of our mind that we use to transfer information from person to person. By hooking someone's attention, we create a channel of communication, and through that channel we can send and receive information. This is how we teach, and this is how we learn.
As I have said, our parents hook our attention and teach us the meaning of words; we agree, and we learn a language. Through language, the word, we start to build the edifice of knowledge. Together, all of our beliefs form a structure that tells us what we believe we are. The Toltec call this shape that our mind takes the human form. The human form is not the form of our physical body. The human form is the structure of our personal Tree of Knowledge. It is everything we believe about being a human; it is the structure of our whole story. This structure is alsmost as solid as our physical body because our faith makes it rigid.
You call yourself a human, and that is what makes you a human. Your faith is invested in your story --- mostly in the main character of your story --- and that is the main problem! The most powerful part of you, your faith, is invested in the liar who lives in your head. Through your faith, you give life to all of those lies. The result is the way you live your life in the present moment because you have faith in the main character of your story. This means that you believe in what you believe you are without any doubt. The rest is just action-reaction. Every habit is a setup for you to perform the role of your main character.
The storyteller has power over you because you have faith in the story that it tells you. Once you support the story with your faith, it doesn't matter whether the story is the truth or not the truth. You believe it; you are done. Thy will be done. That is why Jesus said that if you have just a little faith you can move mountains. Humans are powerful because we have strong faith; we have the capacity to believe strongly, but where is our faith invested? Why do we feel that we have hardly any faith? I can tell you that it's not true that we have so little faith. Our faith is strong and powerful, but our faith is not free. Our faith is invested in all of the knowledge in our head. It is trapped in the structure of our Tree of Knowledge.
The structure is what really controls the dream of our life because our faith lives in that structure. Our faith is not in the voice of our story, and it's not in our reasoning mind. Just because we say, " I will succeed", doesn't mean that our faith follows those words. No, there may be another belief that is stronger and deeper, and that belief is telling us, "You will not succeed". And that is what happens. It doesn'y matter what we do; we fail.
That is why you cannot change yourself just by wishing to change. No, you need to really challenge what you believe you are, especially the beliefs that limit the expression of your life. You need to challenge every belief that you use to judge yourself to reject yourself, to make yourself little.
I remember one of my apprentices asking me "Miguel, why is it so difficult to change my beliefs?" And I told him, "Well, you understand the concept that what you believe you are is not the truth; it's a story. You understand that very well, but you don't believe it. And that is what makes the difference. If you really believe it, if your faith is there, then you change."
So yes, it is possible to change what we believe, to recreate the dream of our life, but first we need to free our faith. And there is only one way to free our faith, and that way is through the truth. The truth is our sword, and it's the only weapon we have against the lies. Nothing but the truth can free the faith that is trapped in the structure of our lies. But with our faith invested in the lies, we no longer see the truth. The lies blind our faith, the power of our creation.
Blind faith is a powerful concept. When our faith is blind, we no longer follow the truth. That is what happened when we ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. We believe the lies, our faith was blinded, and we followed an illusion that was not true. God told us, "You may die". And our faith in lies is death because we lose our power of creation, which is our connection with life or God. We fall into the illusion that we are separate from life, and this leads to self-destruction and death.
If your faith is blind, it is leading you to nowhere. That is why Jesus said if the blind lead the blind, both fall. Now you know why other people's stories do not really help you; it is just like the blind leading the blind. If you have blind faith and you teach blind faith, both fall. If you believe that life is against you, and you teach that life is against you, both are blind because you don't see the truth. Now both believe the lie!
Real faith, or free faith, is what you are feeling in this moment. This moment is real; you have faith in life, faith in yourself, faith for no reason. This is the power of your creation in the moment. From that point of power, you can create whatever you want to create in any direction.
Blind faith is faith without awareness, but when your faith has awareness, that's a different story. When your faith has awareness, you never use the power of your faith against yourself, which means you are impeccable with your word. When you are impeccable with your word, your entire life improves in every direction.Why?
Because the impeccability of your word goes directly to the main character of your story, where most of your faith is invested. To be impeccable with your word means that you never use the word against yourself in the creation of your story. I will talk more about this in the next chapter.
The way to change what you believe about yourself is to take your faith out of the lies.This is the key to changing your story, this is your dream quest, and nobody can do it but you. It's just you and your story. You have to face your own story, and what you will face, of course, is the main character of your story.
Begin by looking at the main character as if it is somebody else, not you. Your whole life story is like a book about you. Detach from the story and become aware of your own creation. Review the story of your life without any judgement so you won't have any emotional reaction. See you own story since you were a child --- all of the growth you have experienced, all of your relationships. Simply take an inventory and perceive the images if you can do that. Imagine that all you have are your lungs to breathe, your eyes to see the beauty, your ears to hear the sounds of nature. It's all about love. Face your life story with your love, and you will experience the most incredible dream quest.
The dream quest is what Buddha did under the bodhi tree, what Jesus did in the desert, and what Moses did on the mountain. All world religions say the same thing because they come from humans who have opened their spiritual eyes and whose faith is no longer blind. But how can they explain the truth to anyone else? Can you imagine Jesus trying to explain the truth two thousand years ago? He talked about truth, forgiveness, and love. He told everybody, "You have to forgive one another. Love is the only way." He gave us the solution for healing the mind, but who was ready back then? Well, the question is : Are we ready now? Do we still want to believe our own lies, for our fanaticism, for our dogmas?
Blind faith, as I said before, is leading us to be fanatics, to impose what we believe onto other people without respecting what they believe. We don't need to impose what we believe. We can respect what each of us believe and know that each of us is dreaming our own dream that has nothing to do with anyone else. Just by having this awareness, we are taking a big step towards healing the mind.
The challenge is to recover the power of your faith and no longer be blinded by lies. But if you want to face the tyrant that you have created, you need to have faith. And the problem is that the faith you have invested in your creation is a thousand times stronger than the faith you have left. So where are you going to find the faith to face your own creation if your creation is eating every ounce of your faith?
Well, if you cannot find faith within you, from what you believe you are, there is a lot of faith outside of you, everywhere. The point is to learn how to gather all of the faith that you need to free yourself from the structure of your lies. That is why humans perform rituals: to gather more faith. When you go to any church and you pray or chant or sing or play the drums or dance, you are gathering power and faith from these rituals. This is really powerful. When you focus your attention on your ritual, this opens a channel to your faith. Your faith follows the ritual, and with your attention hooked into the channel, it is possible to recover your faith.
Ritual can help us to gather faith from nature, and to build faith with one another as a human community. When people gather together, when they love, they experience tremendous faith. This is what you are doing every time you go to church, and time you pray. When you pray and perform rituals, you gather faith that is not really your own faith, but it is faith that you can use to recover your own faith. And if you believe 100 percent in what you want to accomplish with a prayer or ritual, you multiply your intent.
When you pray, you commune with the divine spirit. Prayer creates a bridge that goes from the real you into the divine spirit, pushing aside the main character of your story. This is the key, because the main character of your story is the only thing between you and the divine spirit. Prayer and ritual help to stop the judgements and all the voices talking in your head that tell you why something isn't possible. Both prayer and ritual offer an intense action to stop the voice of knowledge from abusing the emotional body.
All the religions with all their different rituals are wonderful because they provide a way for you to gather the power to break at least some of the self-limiting agreements you have made. Every time you break an agreement, the faith invested in that agreement comes back to you, and you recover a little more of your faith. That is what this book is about. My intent is for you to recover at least part of the faith that you invested in the main character of your story. But if you gather all the faith and you don't use it to change the main character of your story, soon all of the faith you have gathered is consumed by the main character.
That is why you need to reclaim your life from the superstition of what you believe you are. There is only one way to do this, and that is to stop believing the storyteller, the voice of knowledge in your head. When you restore your faith in the truth, and you take it out of the lies, the result is that you become authentic. Your emotional body becomes the way it was when you were a child, and you return to your own common sense. I cannot say that I invented this or that I've discovered something new. As an artist, I only rearrange what already exists. Everything I'm sharing with you has been in this world for thousands of years, not only in Mexico, but in Egypt, India, Greece, Rome. Common sense exists in all of us, but we cannot see it with our attention focused on the lies we believe.
Lies make everything complicated, when the truth is very simple. I think now is the time to return to the truth, to common sense, to simplicity of life itself. Now we know that the lies are so powerful that they blind us. Well, the truth is so powerful that when we finally return to the truth, our entire reality changes. Truth brings us back to paradise, where we experience a strong communion of love with God, with life, with all of creation.
When you release your faith from all the lies, the result is that you free your will. And when your will is free, you can finally make a choice. The voice in your head gives you the illusion that you can make a choice, that you have free will. Well do you really believe that it's your conscious choice to hurt yourself, to make yourself suffer, to reject and abuse yourself? How can you say that you have free will when you choose to hurt the people you love, when you judge your partner and your children, and make them miserable with your judgement?
Just imagine if you really have free will, which is the power to make your own choices. Do you really choose to sabotage your own happiness or your own love? Do you choose to judge yourself, to blame yourself, to live your life in shame and in guilt? Do you choose to believe that you are bad, that you are not beautiful, that you don't deserve to be happy or healthy or prosperous because you are not worth it? Do you choose to constantly fight with the people you love most? If you have free will, you choose the opposite. I think it is obvious that our will is not free.
When you put your faith in truth instead of in lies, your choices change. When your will is free, your choices come from your integrity, not from the programme, that liar in your head. Now you believe whatever you want to believe, and when you have the power to believe whatever you want something very interesting happens. What you want is to love. You don't want anything else but love because you know that what is not love is not the truth!
When your will is free, you choose happiness and love, peace and harmony. You choose to play; you choose to enjoy life. You no longer choose drama. If in the present moment you are choosing drama, it's because you have no choice; it's a habit. It's because you were programmed to be that way, and you don't even know that you have the power to make a different choice. Something else in your head is making that choice, and it's the voice of the liar. Just like that man in the movie A Beautiful Mind, whose visions made the choices for him, your voice is making the choices for you.
Why would we consciously decide to have a fight with our parents or our children or our beloved? It's not that we want to fight. You know, when we are children and we gather with other children, it's because we want to play; we want to have fun and enjoy life. When we grow up and decide to get into a relationship --- mainly a romantic relationship --- is it because we want to create emotional pain and drama? No, common sense tells us that we want to play together, we want to have fun exploring life together. But the Prince of Lies who controls the voice of knowledge represses our common sense.
Common sense is wisdom, and wisdom is different from knowledge. You are wise when you no longer act against yourself. You are wise when you live in harmony with yourself, with your own kind, with all of creation.
Right now you have a choice. What are you going to do with this information? What happens if you don't believe in lies? Take a moment to put your attention on your feelings, to feel all of the possibilities for your life if your faith is no longer blind. If you recover your faith from lies, your suffering is over, your judgements are over. You no longer live with guilt, with shame, with anger, with jealousy. You no longer have the need to be good enough for anybody, including yourself. You accept what you are, whatever you are, even if you don't know what you are. And you don't care to know anymore. It's not important to know, and that is wisdom.
Just imagine that because you don't believe in lies, your whole life changes. You live your life without trying to control everybody around you, and your integrity doesn't allow anybody to control you. You no longer judge other people or need to complain about whatever they do because you know you can't control what people do. Just imagine you choose to forgive whoever hurt you in your life because you no longer want to carry all of that emotional poison in your heart. And just by forgiving everybody, even yourself, you heal your mind, you heal your heart, and you no longer have emotional pain.
Just imagine that you recover the power to make your own choices because you no longer believe the storyteller. You enjoy your life with plenitude, with inner peace, with love. Imagine how you treat your partner, how you treat your children, what you teach the new generation, if you no longer believe in lies. Just imagine the change in the whole of humanity out of something so simple : not believing in lies.
Source : A Toltec Wisdom Book - The Voice of Knowledge by Don Miguel Ruiz.
Chapter 8, Common Sense and Blind Faith. Pg 119 -140.
Ophiuchus' Notes :
Recently, while I was reading this chapter, the message totally resonates and I thought, maybe I should share it here in my blog... Then, even before I could finished the book, a particularly major incident of criminal breach of trust, happened with leaders of a mega-church in my country. Much chaos and exhibition of judgement and outpouring emotions from all sectors of the society with views for and against the "event" were playing out. Interestingly, for me it seems an instant reflection of the difference between common sense and faith blind in action...as if, just to confirm, what it is....And So Be It....
