Movie Makers

The Second Agreement: Don't take anything personally.

Don’t take anything personally – otherwise you set yourself to suffer for nothing.

When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

I am watching a film. It is playing inside my head. It has action and adventure and high drama and romance and comedy and thrills and chills. It plays out in vivid colours of the rainbow at times and stark black and white at others. I am the primary character in my film. I am the hero and the victim and the comic and the romantic lead. I am the do-gooder and the villain and the sufferer and the caretaker. But whatever role I play, I have convinced myself that this is the only way to capture whatever is happening in the Universe. The way that I have captured it in my personal movie. And of course, since I can see the obviousness of this assumption, surely everybody else can as well, right? Everybody else, I tell myself, must be seeing the same film. Why, they have to, since that is the only film that I know about that has recorded all of these moments. So it must be the truth.

You, too, are watching a film. And perhaps I am in your film. But strangely enough for me, I am not the primary character in your film! You are. And the events in our lives, and the reactions to the events in our lives, happen to you. The colours and hues and emotions and thoughts are different than those in my film. I can’t believe it – how could you be so blind or so dense or so simplistic or so naïve in your interpretation of the truth?

For isn’t my truth the Universal Truth? Doesn’t everybody see things my way? Don’t all my personal thoughts and perceptions of the truth simply permeate into the whole wide world and then simply, through magical osmosis enter your world and become your thoughts and perceptions of the truth?

They don’t??????? Hmmmm…..

SE7EN
Sloth, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Pride, Envy, Anger

The First Agreement: Be impeccable with your word

We use the word to spread our personal poison – to express anger, jealousy, envy, and hate.

If we become impeccable with our word, any emotional poison will eventually be cleaned from our mind and from our communication in our personal relationships.


This negativity that permeated through me all of yesterday and manifested itself in the destruction of emotional equanimity and mental discrimination and unconscious actions can only be attributed to this. The destructive power of my thoughts and words when not used with impeccability.

I want to spread my emotional poison then, since that is the only way that I can defend the false perception of reality created by the untruthful word. My position and my actions and my thoughts have to be rationalized and protected. The ego knows that this is the only way that it can defend the inauthentic word or thought. And so, rather than creating and nurturing, I use more words and more thoughts to diminish and destroy.

I express anger rather than simply state my concern; I feel jealousy rather than allow the release of emotional possessiveness; I feel envy rather than happiness and support for others achievements; I feel hate rather than allowing the release of self-righteousness and the feeling of being a victim.

And this is the emotional poison that gathers and grows with inauthentic thoughts and words. It accumulates and then is expressed and spreads more hurt and pain in all my relationships. Especially in my relationship with myself.

Witness the truth of the moment. And then act and feel and think and say. It will always lead to personal freedom.

Blame the Judge; Judge the Blame

The First Agreement:Be impeccable to your word

When you are impeccable to your word you take responsibility for your actions but you do not judge or blame yourself.

Self Rejection is a mortal sin. Use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.


The hardest knocks, the deepest wounds, the strongest blows, I reserve for myself. For every action and every emotion and every thought that I experience, there is judgment rather than simple witnessing, bestowing of blame rather than acceptance of responsibility or egoistic self-congratulation rather than grateful thanks for the perfection of the process.

And all of these actions and emotions and thoughts then create in me self-rejection rather than self-love. Because I use my word to destroy what does not feel true to my heart. And what is not true to my heart, that takes me away from the experience of truth, is also what stands out as failure for the ego. And the ego can never simply witness and accept. It needs to judge and correct or reject or improve or remove. The ego wants to change what is. And all of this energy that it employs in changing the effect of my actions and emotions and thoughts takes away from the energy that energizes me through awareness and acceptance of their truth.

The practice then is to simply allow the actions to execute, the thoughts to unfold and the emotions to emerge. For they are not done based on my own volition. They are simply the way the Universe is expressing itself through me. And so, rather than rejecting them – and in the process myself and in the process the Universe – can I not simply bring them to profound and unconditional awareness?

For, by and by, with such awareness of my actions and emotions and thoughts, there will be the purity and truth that “I” so want to bring to them.

WordsWorth

The First Agreement - Be impeccable to your word.

What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are will all be manifested through the word.
Like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream or your word can destroy everything around you.

My word! The spoken and the unspoken one. That which I use to communicate with others externally through conversation and dialogue and with myself internally through thoughts. That which I use to experience, interpret, express and then manifest my dreams. And my nightmares. For every dream that takes me away from my truth eventually becomes my nightmare.

And I can use the word so frivolously and I can use the word so profoundly. And both are perhaps okay as long as I am impeccable to my word. The interesting result of that, though, is that my word, is based on expressing my truth, and will always manifest in beauty and joy. And when I am not impeccable with my word, it will always, without question, create destruction of my, and everyone else’s around me, dream.

True Believer

The Four Agreements: Domestication & Dream of the Planet

Truth is everywhere but with the agreements and beliefs we have stored in our mind, we have no eyes for the truth. -
The truth of this moment is simple – there is no need to question or struggle with it. It is a gorgeous summer day in the city. I am sitting in a café with large picture windows that show me big blue sky and soft warm sunshine. An urban landscape of cars and shoppers criss-cross with the ample green of trees and shrubs in the headlands beyond.

There are no bindings and restrictions, physically. And if I really let this sink in, there are none mentally or emotionally either. I feel I am in a steady frame of mind. Or at least, there are no external stimuli that are provoking a wild jumble of thoughts and emotions inside me. Nothing externally can be evidenced as wrong or different or challenging. And I should be able to accept this as the truth of this moment.

But can I? Can I let this moment just be and make an agreement with myself to not question its uneventful simplicity? Can I let consciousness flow in and out of me and make me aware of the truth of the moment, in this moment of truth?

And there in lies the dilemma – since it is the “I” that assumes that it is allowing this moment to unfold in awareness, rather than the other way around. And the “I” therefore, feels responsible for working on making this moment better than what it is.

And with this agenda in place, and referring to the thick set of agreements and beliefs that it holds so dear to its survival, “I” sets about righting all the wrongs of this moment. Suddenly the panhandlers smoking and spitting outside are irritants brought to my attention. The baby whimpering on another table distracts me from my work. The music is now too loud – I can’t concentrate. The quick scan to check for ‘that’ email brings new disappointment and disillusion with this whole dating process.

“I” descends into a familiar funk. And so in the process to live up to its agreements, the truth of the moment gets clouded in a complex web of mind-bound hope, stress, anxiety and doubt.