The Disharmony Of The Four Agreements
A Synchronicity Symphony On Non-Impeccable Language And Ruiz’s Poorly Embodied Intention as Spiritual-ByPass Enabler
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Preface
“yes I did read the four agreements but a long time ago so I couldn't tell you what they were but I did like them and agreed with them at the time” (Laura, a friend and truth-seeker, via email).
This comment is typical of the kind of reaction I get from people when I ask them about The Four Agreements. And most everyone I’ve asked has read it — something to do with my circle of friends around yoga and spirituality, I suspect. With a bit more discussion I ask if they noticed that their lives were significantly improved as a tangible result or benefit of having read Miguel Ruiz’s ‘Practical Guide to Personal Freedom’? And that answer is ‘No’ or, with something like my friend’s reply, they say that it was a nice read and it felt good having read it. (At the time I was writing this, in an Oaxaca café, I found I was drawn strongly to interrupt the mexicano at the next table and ask him about Los Cuatro Acuerdos. That became a delightful synchronicity to temper my observation. Detailed below in ‘By Their Exceptions Are the Rules Proved — I Meet Isaiah and Paulina’.)
Why no life-change? Ruiz, in his subtitle, has just about promised ‘personal freedom’ to those who enact those ostensibly four easy steps. And it seems to me that it has not significantly delivered on its promise of personal freedom even though his freedom book has been purchased by millions! As possible evidence of that failure, the convid attack had most of humanity walk themselves fearfully into a joyful embracing of a masked self-imposed imprisonment and a jab of unknown stuff to magically redirect their collective anxiety to the dangerous and undeserving unjabbed. Where was their freedom?
And beyond that, those few freedom fighters who fought the convid hard sell propaganda were castigated, shamed and at times forcefully imprisoned — the opposite of personal freedom. The jabbed didn’t express freedom and demanded that the uninjected lose their freedom to help the injected feel free. Nowhere were there signs of anything approaching don Ruiz’s claimed ‘personal freedom’.
And that includes most of the many spiritual/ yogi practitioners around me who were a significant part of the clientele of that book’s ostensible freedom enhancing practices. Curious, indeed. For example, my yoga community demanded medical tyranny and locked out their communities from freely gathering. And they went so far as to condemn and expel from their group at least one person as too toxic to allow continued membership. (For my look at my experiences and thoughts about the obvious juxtaposition of being free or not as yogis and Buddhists under imposed medical tyranny see:
![Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, so how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' A: Yoga as drug.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06fc7eb1-d0b0-46b0-9af7-52d6805cd2c9_1523x654.png)
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Shortly before I started this deep dive into The Four Agreements, I talked to my perceptive and perspicuous sister. I was curious to know her opinion about it. She doesn’t think that she has read it. I asked for her thoughts about my recent realisation that Ruiz’s presentation of his first instruction — his advocacy of being impeccable with one’s language§ — is a near perfect example of a carefully made construct of non-impeccable words. And that that inherent self-contradiction, that his actual non-impeccability with his words had created an easily digestible feel-good opportunity for spiritual by-pass. My sister responded ‘Hmmmmm. That’s interesting. When I worked at the used bookstore that was the single most common book we received.’
§ To be impeccable with one’s language is, at core, to speak truthfully and to not lie. It is number two of the Yamas in The Yoga Sutras and, of course, core to the teachers of just about every one except delusional marxists hiding behind post-modern affectation and pedantic lies-are-true fictions! A synchronistic example is Katherine Maher, the current CEO of NPR, an organisation ostensibly extant to help listeners understand what is true in the world. She is currently being questioned by American senators on the scope and breadth of NPR’s biased reporting, lies and marxist propaganda. Maher was repeatedly caught in lies and/or efforts at evasion and obfuscation. Not a surprise because a few years earlier, she argued in a Ted Talk that truth is a source of confusion best put aside in order to accommodate lying in order to create harmony:
… perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. (Congress EXPOSES NPR’s Lies & Propaganda (with evidence & data), my emphasis.)
That The Four Agreements was the most commonly received book at my sister’s used book store is likely evidence enough of its durability and value: a temporary feel good self-help distraction book quickly discarded rather than treasured as a bible-like life-saver.
This essay began as a result of a series of recently experienced interesting synchronicities that were initiated with a Four Agreements encounter that soon after expanded to events and exchanges at a couple of men’s group meetings. With The Four Agreements encounter I began to wonder why the people I know who have read this book didn’t see significant changes in their lives — despite Ruiz’s claim that it is A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.
By inference, and from my own twenty-five years of moving towards impeccable language practices, and without really sufficient statistical evidence, and with being open to being shown to have made a perceptual error arising out of inference, this essay began with the idea that there has been a widespread failure of people to experience significant and lasting change after reading The Four Agreements: practical or not, personal freedom was not achieved after reading the book. (Ruiz’s webpage includes links to buying course work from him. I make no comment on the effectiveness of his courses and, for now, I am not in a position to take them to investigate them. Until this essay I had idea he had such a practice.)
As I began writing The Disharmony Of The Four Agreements it expanded to include how I am being perceived at the men’s group. As distinct from how I thought I might be perceived. Too funny.
As noted, it is very possible that my biased and small sample size, and the synchronicities I’ve experienced around it, have taken me to a false conclusion. And so I am curious about that: is my bold claim that Ruiz’s book hasn’t significantly changed the lives of most of the people who read it actually true? Is it true that it didn’t do more than give a temporary hit of feel-good lightness? I ask this in part because of my encounter with the Mexicano, detailed below, who claimed that reading it helped him significantly to remove anxiety and live a much better life.
And with that it came to me that with this essay I have the opportunity to test my argument with polling — and my first substack poll.
So, if you would like to help me to eat more crow or help me to crow my synchronistic acuity, please participate in this poll. Note: in the creation of this poll I discovered that substack’s poll structure has some curious limitations. Rather than go to an outside polling site I’ve worked around those limitations here, although the work around asks from you a bit of patience to complete it. I have posted the long questions above the poll with enumeration and then put the numbers themselves into the poll. And since the limit is five questions per poll, I’ve split the longer polls into two parts. 🙌
If not, why not? The Questions for the Poll: 👇👇 1. I didn’t hear of it. 2. I heard of it and didn’t find myself drawn to read it. 3. I heard bad things about it. 4. Other — please comment below. 👇👇
If yes, what was your reaction? (The Questions for the Poll are split into two polls as 5 options are max in a poll.) 👇👇 Part 1: 1. I loved it at the time and I immediately enacted his agreement practices and maintain them to this day. 2. I loved it at the time and I immediately enacted his agreement practices and then stopped them after a while despite my having made a strong intention to do them for life. 3. I enjoyed it and began his agreement practices and maintain them to this day. 4. I enjoyed it and began his agreement practices and then stopped them after a while despite my intention. Part 2: 5. I enjoyed it and thought that his ideas were good and I thought I would enact them yet somehow I didn’t despite my intention to do so. 6. I was indifferent to it or I didn’t like it and I don’t really understand why I finished reading it. I was not inspired to agree to enact the agreements. 7. I hated it and couldn’t wait for it to end. Once I start a book, I finish it regardless how obnoxious I find it. I felt duped by a false sell and ignored it. 8. Other — please comment below. 👇👇
Introduction: It Started With A Synchronicity — Does Everything Significant Start That Way?
How to start this? With the synchronicities that started it, of course! What that means, perhaps, is that it had already started itself in early 2023 with a specific manifestation of Gautama’s concept of dependence co-arising: I sat down in a café in Oaxaca at the table next to a man writing in a paper journal. I felt I wanted to talk with this man and, because of the unusualness if not rarity of pen and paper in this time of computers, I engaged his scripting-by-hand as a guide to open to him an opportunity for us to talk. And talk we did.
We became friends. We openly shared with each other the uniqueness of being caminantes (walkers/ travellers) on our own and shared intentioned and focused truth-seeking el caminos here in Oaxaca. We quickly discovered that we were both, in a tangible sense, refugees from the convid tyranny. Somehow we found our ways to this foreign land, and had become strangers in a strange land, to quote from the I Ching. (#56 The Wanderer. “This describes a wanderer who knows how to limit his/her desires outwardly, though s/he is inwardly strong and aspiring. Therefore s/he finds at least a place of shelter in which s/he can stay. S/he also succeeds in acquiring property, although even with this s/he is not secure. S/he is to be always on guard, ready to defend him/herself with force. Hence s/he is not at ease. S/he is persistently conscious of being a stranger in a strange land.”)
In those sixteen months, with scores of deep and sometimes challenging conversations, we talked about the many different aspects of spirituality and associated practices. Our conversations included how the great convid reset agenda heightened, clarified, demanded and inspired in and of us the deepest look at meaning in life, in our life, in our worldly experiences and encounters. Those enquiries into Self, to what ever extent they were more or less successful, had been to direct us towards or even on the path of what Ruiz’s sub-title seems to proffer: personal freedom. We had left medical tyranny. And we both had long since recognised the importance of clearly stating goals and intentions — impeccable language — from very different starting points.
Now, with this hint of synchronistic hindsight it is interesting that, despite the planned convid’s best efforts to remove from everyone basically all personal freedoms with the enactment of an archetypal devouring mother energy, my and my friend’s shared journey did not include any discussion or even mention of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. (I wonder if Ruiz acquiesced to the convid tyranny or rejected it?) It was with the Los Cuatro Acuerdos synchronicity experience in January of this year, 2025 — details a bit later — that I learned that my friend had indeed read that book too. For him it was also a long time ago and, from our discussion later that day, he thought it was a good book, although the details were lost.
For my part I had, until that synchronistic day in early January 2025, completely forgotten the book and even that I’d written a sharp and critical review of it. Back in 2018 I came near to dismissing it with just a two out of five star rating: I found it extremely repetitively wordy and flush with non-impeccable language! The hypocrisy of its violation of impeccable word usage astounded me. At the time I waffled in rating it and eventually gave it three stars by condescendingly allowing that few readers would likely notice its built-in hypocrisy and because the principles were spiritually and psychologically basic and sound. Certainly not revelatory to anyone already well begun on the journey of personal responsibility as the singular stepping stone towards spiritual autonomy and stoic indifference to the opinions of others. His principles are, basically, cornerstones of pretty much all books of spiritual and/or personal wisdom. For example, with different language they are core AA practices. (I’m not sure I’d be so generous with my rating of it today. See Guy’s Review. in Goodreads, or my summary of it later in the essay.)
The Unseen Beginning of A Grit-of-Sand Synchronicity — A Year Later the ‘We Don’t Have to Do Anything’ Pearl Explodes and Threatens a Friendship!
The initiation of the synchronicity in early 2023 that was to become manifest in a new form in January 2025 began when I asked my new friend if I could tell him that during our conversation he frequently expressed a form of spell-binding bully language. He said that he was interested in that and so I explained about ‘have to’ and ‘should’. This is something I often do with people who I perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be truth-seekers. And unlike Miguel Ruiz, I consider the removal of these two bully words, in particular, to be cornerstone practices of impeccable language usage. I suggested that this was a habit of speech with which we are ‘naturally’ enculturated. And that they were restricting his freedom and agency because they give away our personal authority and in that way limits our freedom to act and change autonomously. (Likely those were not my actual words at the time, although I did ask for his okay before sharing my language perspective. For many years I understood the importance of asking the other person for his/her okay before broaching with him/her with these ideas.) For those arguments see
Unseen, We Live Bully Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a Miss-Spelled See of Words
After my discussion he said he understood. And, with my (false) understanding of his stated understanding, I asked him if he wanted me to point out to him the times he unconsciously used ‘have to’ and ‘should’ when talking with me. Rarely do those with whom I share this dis-spelling information even hear themselves saying those spell-binding words because, even with a ‘good’ intentioned desire to change their language, that language spell is so deep that they don’t actually hear/see themselves, or others, using it. And often it seems to me that they only superficially and/or intellectually understand the words without knowing that they are lie-spells. Those lies are so normalised as truth that they have become one with our day-to-day language. This language, these words, are an epitome of black spell magic hiding deeply in our unconscious. Breaking that spell for many is difficult and to remain unseeing in familiar discomfort is the default action.
‘Yes,’ he replied. And so, going forward, I began to tell him when I heard ‘should’ or ‘have to’ pass over his tongue and out through his teeth and lips. Although not as assiduously as his extensive use of them could have inspired me to do. I came to see that his continued near obliviousness to using them was and is a sign that he had, with likely good intentions and unconsciously, lied to me: the idea of it sounded ‘good’ to him at the level of his spirituality orientated mind. And yet beneath that level, some powerfully energetic and unseen part of him didn’t really want him to make that particular change; perhaps, in response to me, he thought that having heard that ostensibly ‘good’ idea was sufficient to not require acting on them; or, perhaps, that that kind of change wasn’t really important enough to him at this time to enact, and so he didn’t have sufficient mental energy to replace those long lived familiar narratives of a diminished self being kept small with disempowering language. This common scenario expresses the rut of the familiar samskara that we haven chosen to deny, to not see, and that although it had at one time helped us has now become an uncomfortable and restrictive limitation against freedom with truth.
In early 2024 he just had to spew that ‘pearl’ up into my face. My piece of verbal sand had gritted him the wrong way. It had taken him about a year of being ideologically wisdom-bullied — by me and by himself — with having to stop using have to and having to tolerate my unwanted annoying nagging as further bullying, before he expressed his rage towards my unwanted policing of him. In a long text-message-rant he descried my language policing as unwanted and intrusive bullying. He argued that it was something that he had never asked for, and that he had never given me permission to do. My paraphrase.
True enough! It was I who had initially asked him if he wanted my help. He hadn’t asked me for my help. Although he had forgotten that he in fact had given me permission. At the time I had asked him because I had been inspired by the time and effort he had dedicated to his spiritual journey, some of which included his elaboration of the importance of language in his business of being a successful fund raiser. He had forgotten that he had agreed to listen to me offer to him my ‘pearls’. And likewise for my help with seeing his language habit. At the time I didn’t see or understand that my pearls were just sand to him, that he hadn’t really said ‘Yes’ honestly.
And, with his reaction to my ‘grit’, I had a crystal clear example of how, when the student isn’t ready, the teaching is ipecac. I responded to his frustrated rage with recounting the gritty details of that history. And I told him that I would stop my ‘bullying’ without any feelings of hurt or disappointment or anger. It matters not to me whether or not he changes his language — although I am almost always hopeful that the hearers of my argument will also be receivers of it and be inspired enough to change into a language practice that is more fully embodied and that empowers human beings who decide to choose and use choosing language instead of continuing to depotentiate themselves with victimising lie-making spell-word language.
And he said something remarkable: that my having asked him for his okay was itself a form of bullying because, he claimed with a straight face, the act of asking, itself, creates a have to condition of replying ‘Yes.’ Really? Is that true, that for some people being asked a question is to be socially bullied!
A new awareness. And one that strikes me as very very sad. Amazing.
Other Recent Examples of the Exploding Pearl
His reaction was echoed later in 2024 by two other people who similarly complained that they had felt that I presented to them my argument in a bullying way! They felt that they had been bullied by me and/or my words. (Since beginning to write and edit this, I’ve presented my idea of the absolute pernicious bullying nature of ‘have to’ and ‘should’ to several more people. Now I ask at the conclusion of my discourse ‘Did or do you feel that the ideas I’ve presented, and/or the way I presented them, made you feel in anyway bullied?’ I do my very best to not use just my ears to listen to their answer. I want to feel, to see if at that intangible other dimensional sense organ of intuition I can hear/ feel the lie or not. Time will tell, perhaps.)
After that, with some reflection, I remembered two other times before that I was told by individuals that I had engaged them as a bully. In those cases they were both when I presented to a group of people, and not one-to-one. And it was only one or two of the group who had complained that my enthusiastic expression of the importance of the impeccability of language had felt to them like I had bullied them.
Of these four instances one of the bullied complainers had felt bullied while reading my essay Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks: Unseen, We Live Bully Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a Miss-Spelled See of Words: it wasn’t from my oral presentation.
The latest was shortly after I joined a small online group filled with ‘have to’ language from its members. It is an activist group looking to remove harm-inducing medical ignorance from society, one person at a time. In my second visit, I think, I asked the members, as a group, for their okay to share with them my thoughts about why their unconscious use of ‘have to’ and ‘should’ is disempowering, distancing and estranging. I approached them with the idea that if they removed unconscious bully language from their discourses, that that that would empower their ability to connect with people. And that that would help bridge the cognition-gap they were faced with when presenting the idea that a nearly ubiquitously accepted and cherished allopathic scientific ‘truth’ was in fact false and without scientific merit. Their purpose was to break a giant word-spell lie that has engulfed narcissistic medical science and its gaslit victims; and my intention was to break them free from the even bigger narcissistic word-spell they were under: perpetrators and victims of bully Stockholm Syndrome.
In all those group ‘have-to disclosure events' I hadn’t asked each individual about sharing those ‘pearls’. I had improperly categorised all of them as the deepest truth-seekers, people who would be keen to hear and understand some of the most subtle black spell words we’ve been indoctrinated to use. Thus it was, after my spiel, sooner or later, some of the members turned to rend me.
Five-Times the Charm: The Unhealthy Rending by Activated Activist Energy and the Realisation that Activists are Haters
After having been rent five times — slow learning anyone(!) — I noticed a common element with the rending people: each are suffused with an active activist energy, that drive or need to fix the world from a place of ethical standards and moral propriety. One of the members even blazons ‘activist’ on his avatar as a proudful state of being, a state that blazons to me the hell created by the self-deluded with the lie of their so-called good intentions. And my engagements with him have been filled with some of the worst forms of emotional manipulation and disrespect for others that can be imagined, including threats of suicide as punishment to the group for having improperly dis-respected his high moral activism.
Recent activist encounters have brought to my awareness that what I experienced with him qualifies his behaviour and language as a nauseating form of passive aggressive hatred. Hatred of what? Hatred of life as it is, not as he thinks it should be.
The most recent activist encounter, the one that clicked the realisation that activists are life-haters, was with an activist suffering from very intense Trump Derangement Syndrome. She argued passionately and unrepentantly that the only way to fix Trump-as-evil-incarnate was to hate him. She also argued that hatred of racism would fix racism because hatred energises activism. When I asked her when had hatred done anything good her answer was ‘the French Revolution.’ I rejected openly that idea and then after a short and intense discussion we agreed to disagree.
I Hate to Write it, I Just Got Another Day of Final Edit Synchronicity to Add — Howie Mandel and Candace Owens
I had a busy day that started with leading yoga at a hotel. Then I resumed work for the final audio edits for this essay. Then the Clearsight Method vision workshop to heal my eyes and end a life long dependency on eye glasses before looking to finish editing the audio of this essay. I stopped before finishing the edits and paused to listen to Tuesday’s Candace Owens videocast. In it she referenced her having been a guest with Howie Mandel’s and his daughter Jackelyn Shultz’s Youtube channel.
I was curious about the Mandel guest-spot and near the end of it my ears rang with a synchronicity bell when Mandel suggested that hate is an energising force! Really? Owens’ response is brilliant. The next morning the sound of the bell kept reverberating inside my head and I wondered if it was significant enough to include it as another last minute change. And my body has said that it is to be included, and so longer this essay has become, as Yoda might put it. And the cicadas were loud today, so I wound up recoding it just around dusk.
[CO:] … we always just had a very good sense of like making fun of each other because that's how we grew up we grew up you know with no money and we grew up with laughter. And it's a beautiful way to grow up and to not engage yourself so far [that] like that you start viewing people as like your eternal enemy [laughter]. So it was very healthy. Now! Now!
[HM:] That hate is the fuel, though, that propels success and failure. There's no middle ground.
[CO:] Hmmmm. Yeah. I don't know.
[HM:] You don't think so? You don't think in—
[CO:] I think people are tired of the hate. I do think, I think in 2016 it was a battle. I think with, like Trump just shocked everyone whether you loved him or you hated him.
[HM:] And you don’t think this was a battle this time?
[CO:] No. I think people are a little exhausted with calling everybody racist. And it's just the name calling. I just think that we're all tired. I don't know, personally, do we have to keep, like we get to keep everybody is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic? Can we all just agree as a nation, and just stop calling everybody everything? And be done with it so we can now go back to being normal and just maybe thinking that people have different perspectives. And people—
[HM:] A girl can dream a girl.
[CO: laughter] A girl, a girl can dream. That's where I'm at (1:02:12 Candace Owens Reveals Truths on Russell Brand, Harvey Weinstein & Taylor Swift 2025.04.08 in Howie Mandel Does Stuff).
End of hatred good / tired-of-hatred synchronicity.
Resume the Synchronicity Interrupted Section ‘Five Times the Charm Rending Experiences…’
It was with this experience that I began to wonder to what extent, in general, is all activist energy, at its core, an embodiment of hatred as a rationalised moral good. I’ve argued that all morals are, at their core, the way we humans rationalise away compassion whenever we want to ‘engage’ with an undeserving. As proof of concept, I cite as evidence how the morally ‘good’ activists engage their fight against whatever is the morally ‘bad’ by putting themselves on such a moral high ground that it is ‘natural’ for them to blindly rationalise words and acts of hatred, often with threats and/or acts of violence that look exactly the same as those done by so-called ‘hate-groups.’ And further evidence is that since the moral elevation of woke ideology in the last ten to fifteen years — with woke-left being a mask that strives to hide marxist power victim dynamics — our society and culture have been highly energised into bully activist hatred as a morally good club that ‘has to be used’ by marxists to fix the marxists’ artificially expanded/ created troubles of race, gender, and sex. And their morals turn on an authoritarian ideological dime with the next moral outrage de jour — such as the recent burning with morally justified hatred the cars they had a few months earlier been adulating in deference to having idolised Musk as a near-god manifestation of emancipation from petroleum climate change hell.
I told an activist friend about how disgusted I felt about the woman who was saddened that the last pandemic didn’t kill enough people. And her hope that the next one would do a better job. See,
How to Mine the Mine and the Not Mine of My Own Disgust Inside and Out
He said with blunt, remarkable, and amazing honesty: ‘I was one of those people, once. I used to wish that people would die to save the environment until my wife pointed out to me that I was talking about the death of our children, too.’ Does that qualify as hatred, to proud-fully display being morally good by actively, or even passively, hoping that the strangers of life would die as undeserving useless consumers and forest and planet destroyers in order to fulfil someone’s narcissistic ideology of an unpeopled eden?
I now understand, more clearly, that people with an activated activist mindset and/or habit of societal interaction based solely on fixing the undeserving other, will tend to read that paragraph as being condescending and bullying! And yet, freedom of speech is living with the risk of being seen as offensive and of being offended. And activists often wish the other be dead with a barely concealed hatred. I was horrified to read on a friend’s so-called pro-life vegan group how casually and routinely, with thumbs up, contributors demanded death to the evil meat-eaters as just and right.
Too Funny, I Suddenly Realised that I Had Violated Agreement Number Three!
And now I laugh with the realisation that I had been in violation of Ruiz’s third agreement — don’t make assumptions! And that the people rending me had violated Ruiz’s second agreement — don’t take things personally. Both of these displays are further evidence that Ruiz’s popular book has had at best marginal success, although likely it helped with certain people now and then to move them towards agency and personal freedom.
And with that, I laugh, again, because of course, that has been my observation and criticism of yoga. That it is, very often, perhaps even most often as practiced in the so-called west, a really pernicious form of spiritual by-pass. (And Gautama made similar comments, often in passing, about the difference between understanding dependent co-arising or having experienced it.) For my take, see
The personally offended others took into themselves the feeling that from me they had been verbally assaulted by a me who had, in some way, actually assaulted them! And in reality, I had assaulted them! Accidentally I had invaded their space when I assumed that they would appreciate at the fullest level my pointing out to them how their use of untruthful language was hurting their freedom and independence. I don’t remember if Ruiz argued that to make assumptions about people is to assault the emotional space of those people. The assault is to have pre-engaged them as a stereotype of some sort without giving them the space of their place at this time.
Now, death by laughter! Is it possible that we were all, collectively, truly 100% committed to our self-proclaimed truths? If so, then I could with delight argue that we had fully honoured agreement number four by having perfectly put our energies towards, unconsciously, violating Ruiz’s agreements one through three with self-centred blindness and narcissistic good intentioned moralistic gaslighting. [lmao.]
And that is a great caution against blindly giving 100 percent: do we have the calmness of mind to see correctly whether or not this or any action is both eccentric and appropriate for the situation? How did that old joke go? I spent my life climbing the ladder of success only to find that I had put the ladder against the wrong wall.
You Aren’t Hurting Me so Relax Out of Activated Activism on My Behalf! I do Not Want Your Unasked for Good Intentioned Help
And in a very recent and beautiful face-to-face conversation with one of them, I discovered that that person, who had seen me as having bullied the group when I gave them the ‘have to’ discourse, had actually confused my suggestions to them to change their language as my reaction to them as the victim of their bully language. She had misunderstood my argument as my having been triggered into being a reactionary self-defending bully. I was shocked when eventually I understood that that person thought I was demanding of them to change their language so that I would not feel victimised by their use of ‘have to’ and ‘should’.
Wow! That kind-hearted person came from a place of compassionate victim-space-making — for the distraught other — me in this case. She thought that I was like a pronoun-weakling-wokeling, that I was so weak that I had to tell the bullies to stop victimising me with their words. To stop killing me softly, with their words. Then I understood why she insisted that the way she was using ‘have to’ and ‘should’ was with gentleness and love. And now I see why I struggled to understand how she could not see that the inherent energetic spell-nature of those words disallows their use from ever being gentle and loving even when whispered by a good intentioned and kind-hearted angel.
Because I was so oblivious to her conception of me, that she thought that I was their bully language victim, I didn’t understand that she hadn’t understood my argument. She did not see, nor did I see her not seeing, that it is the energy of the lie in those words that is the problem. And that their use by others doesn’t victimise me because my awareness of their being a lie completely depotentiates them. That, ultimately, their use only victimises the user of them and marks them as unconscious of having been lie-spelled and that they are unconsciously continuing to cast the lie-spell that diminishes the energy of their agency and energises societal and individual separation and isolation.
Wow! Verbal communication is so difficult. What a great insight! It has expanded my awareness of how much more learning there is for me in order for me to be fully able to really listen and to really hear where true trued words are truly unafraid to tread truthfully and, perhaps, even where angels may fear to truth.
That person went silent when I said that “I don’t care at all, personally, if other people use ‘have to’ and ‘should’: other people using that language in my presence or directed towards me does not hurt me! Absolutely not!” I explained that my passionate exposition comes from my wanting to see the other person fully empowered. That that empowerment will make huge strides to full autonomy once those self-hurting and enervating language practices stop. I reiterated, hopefully to a changed set of ears, that the core fundamental nature and energy of those powerful lie-spell words are, unambiguously, disempowering and depotentiating regardless of the intent when used. Perhaps not as much to the other as to themselves, the user — especially when the lie-spell is cast onto themselves. They are lie-spell mantras that remove our agency and blind us. Seeing their lie-spelling nature depotentiates them and removes us from the energy field of the necromongers who think we are stupid and who want us to be blind and weak when, in reality, we are born clear-eyed and strong and who, with time and a hell of a lot of effort, are indoctrinated into the false-narratives of weakness and myopia.
And another important personal realisation was that I had been inspired to ‘bully’ these groups with my ‘have-to’ discourse because I had enjoined them with having failed to embody Ruiz’s agreement number three: I had assumed that they were all 100% committed agents of ‘truth-seeking’ — just because of my perception of the group’s raison d’être. With that assumption I put to them energetically that my method helps truth-seeking by strengthening the truth-seeker’s personal empowerment and seeing skills. [Headshake!]
What I didn’t see was that I had blinded my Self with having assumed that people drawn to such a group were automatically, fundamentally, going to be 100% committed to being ‘true’ truth-seekers of everything and not just some things — or of even anything. Nor that, for them, they weren’t in that group to seek the truth of ‘things’ outside the group’s mission statement; they were there to be activists suffused with a compassion-less moral truth who had mostly put their activist energy outside of themselves — they were there to fix the wrong-world out there, filled with the same exhortations and reality denying ‘have tos’ and ‘shoulds’ that the oligarchs are using to energise their version of fixing the world. (The recent example in my life, referenced above, of the moralist who expressed deep disappointment that the pandemic hadn’t pro-activistically killed enough people on humanity’s behalf to reduce human population sufficiently to fix climate change is a good example. See
How to Mine the Mine and the Not Mine of My Own Disgust Inside and Out.)
And so, filled with moralistic fire and self-righteous hatred, the activists have no time, no interest nor perhaps, even the ability to see that the ubiquitous use of ‘have to’ and ‘should’ is not far from expressing an obsessive compulsive need to fix outer world traumas instead of fixing our own inner worlds of trauma — those traumas that we love to project into the world — no differently than what is being done by the necromongers and their depopulation agenda fixes. We have not seen the enemy in those we pillory because the enemy is in reality, the un-red-pilled in us.
John Cleese articulated this perfectly with exquisite comedic timing and a true artist’s pre-woke prescient eye and ear in 1987. The easy path to the feeling good happiness of becoming morally good by becoming a day-trader-extremist against anything called out as the source of evil by an appropriate or revered moralist-de-jour:
… the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies.
Let me explain...
The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive isn't it? (‘John Cleese on Extremism’.)
The hypocrisy just keeps on giving: I didn’t see that my ‘better seeing language’ hadn’t helped me to see my assumption that people who by an ostensible life-affirming association or common intention to disseminate a social truth that has been suppressed, are therefore at their cores seeking truth, that they are truth-seekers.
And, worse, that leads to this startling question: has my recent focus on all morality being fundamentally the rationalised removal of compassion been because I am one of those extremists who, in my case, see language abusers as the enemy that I want to see extirpated one predicated phrase at a time? [Headshake.] How to respond? Well, perhaps laughter is the proof of my not being completely besotted to moralistic pedantry: the truly true blue moralists are humourless because the energy of moral truth and rectitude excludes the nuances of ambivalence and ambiguity that are the fire and brimstone of humour.
And that takes me back to that seemingly unsolvable problem: how can I know that what I think of as true is true or not? How do I know that I am practicing delusion or Gautama’s ‘right seeing’ or Patañjali’s ‘avidya’? How do I know that I’m not a language activist filled with hatred against any and all usage of ‘have to’ and ‘should’? That question is not the gist of this essay, although it is worth keeping in mind. I discussed it in some detail in
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/the-apollo-moon-landing-didnt-happen
Why This Is A Big Deal, Although Maybe Not For The Reasons You Think: What Means The Creation of a False Idol?
Synchronicity Interlude — A Bit of Backstory I Don’t Have to Share — I Want to, I Choose To
I had completely removed ‘should’ and ‘have to’ from my language by the mid or late 90s. ’Should’ was the first to go in part because I had been inspired by Gerald Jampolski’s excellent self-help book Love is Letting Go of Fear within which ‘should’ is included in a long list of words to avoid using. (I’ve since elaborated on his great introduction to disempowering words and significantly pared it down.)
At the time I was reading Jampolski my awareness of the spell-power of ‘should’ was sparked with a synchronistic encounter with someone shoulding himself to death about visiting, or not, his mother on mother’s day.
Personal Responsibility is the Power Point of Now
My feeling and impression of the importance of this impeccability of language has become stronger with time as my depth of understanding its deleterious impact has increased along with the number of people with whom I’ve shared, debated, discussed and dissected it. To me this simple form of impeccable language, which Ruiz and Jampolski both claim as well, is important to move us individually and societally from unconscious enslavement and mostly blind obedience to authority structures of all sorts into personal agency and individuated independence. With impeccable language we strengthen our movement towards and into freedom because it expands and empowers the breadth of our being personally responsible for all that comprises our lives. That complete personal responsibility is the breath of freedom from moral authorities outside of our selves.
Relatively recently I’ve seen, with great clarity, that personal responsibility is the core root from where personal empowerment grows. And daily language impeccability abets that empowerment very powerfully and, perhaps, even more importantly than daily outward facing practices of ungrounded activism, yoga, prayer, meditation and mantra. And the opposite, lie-spelling language, negates empowerment and freedom by keeping us from being 100% responsible for this life.
I have been sharing this idea since the early 00s. So often, as it happens, that a friend and co-worker who sat close to me began to call it ‘the have-to lecture’ because she had overheard me tell it so frequently. I told it often to the different people who came to my desk wanting to learn from me something about telecommunications’ engineering, the principles of engineering drafting, or how to use the computer and/or the programs on it more effectively. People came to me in innocent supplication for technical training and often got blasted with the ‘have to lecture’ sometime after I had heard the tenth or twentieth ‘have to’ or ‘should’ about this or that from them. I would suggest to him/her on the critical life-changing importance of being impeccable with our words — of course I didn’t (and don’t typically) use ‘impeccable’ — and to stop using ‘have to’ and ‘should’ as a simple and life changing opportunity for clarity of self-awareness, expansion of personal agency, and the enablement of intimacy between the people in our lives, be they family, friends, co-workers or strangers.
Uh Oh, D’oh Doh! I Get a Homer to Get Back to the Present With Nary a Simper
As I wrote that yet another laughable ‘aha’ hypocrisy hit me! More like a Homer ‘Doh d’oh’, though, if truth is to be adhered to by choice and not bullied obligation!
OMG! Here I am examining with good intentions, supposedly, the failure of Ruiz’s agreements to change people. And what have I just done? I’ve cited five of the people I haven’t changed and, worse, people with whom I have inspired anger, frustration and condemnation. People who received my pearls hurtfully despite, or perhaps because of, good intentions! And when that thought flashed into my awareness, like a flurry of doh d’oh do-si-dos, the reality of all the many other yesterdays quickly filled my mind: how many people have I ‘have-to-discoursed’? And, of those, how many changed! And how many had I hurt unknowingly?!¡!
Likely Ruiz’s has had thousands of people who were genuinely changed, to greater or lesser extents, by his sound and wise agreements despite what I see as bully language issues and a core hypocrisy with his presentation. (And I’ve met two or three of them just recently in a brilliant set of synchronicity elements that began to happen as soon as I began to write this. I elaborate on that a bit later in the essay.) And certainly he has imparted in millions, by sales and accolades, some feeling of happiness after their encounter with his agreements even if they were not enough to have created in their lives the promised freedom.
And me? What about me?! A handful or maybe a score of possibly less imprisoned people at the very most! The intelligent Universe, whatever the hell that is or might be, truly has a wicked sense of humour because here I am critiquing Ruiz for what I am most certainly guilty of! 🤣😳😂🫣 ROTFL! 🤣😳😂🫣 Where does not hypocrisy lay in wait to bite our own asses?! Who of us honours, truly, restraint when casting stones at, or from castigating the motes in the eye of, our neighbour? Doh d’oh do-si-dos!
And with that 🙌 🙌 BANG! 🙌 🙌 out of the blue I got a…
What Began as a Double Synchronicity Insert Alert!
1) While I was writing the above I took a short break to check my emails. And one of them caught my eye. From the deep Turtles All the Way Down vaccine investigator and at least partially red-pilled Steve Kirsch, an echo from long ago about how best to change people’s minds!
This had me laughing because ChatGPT gave to Kirsch very nearly the same advice to Kirsch that I gave Kirsch back in Aug of 2022!
And the common ‘theme’ with vaccine red-pilling and impeccable language teaching is that they are both about we, the self proclaimed often autodidactic know-enough-changemongers, striving Cassandra-like to fruitlessly change people’s minds about what they perceive as true when we, on the other hand, know that what they perceive as truth is in reality false. And the ‘Kirsch’ essay I wrote evolved into the ‘Yogic Calmness’ essay included above when I responded to someone who read my answer to Kirsch and questioned why, if practices of yogic and meditative calmness such as in Buddhism give a clear vision of truth, did so many yoga studios and Buddhist temples fly Ukrainian flags, demand useless masks, mandate injections and shun and/or ostracise their uninjected members?
2) And the second one happened a bit earlier that night. And it flips the time-sequence of this writing back-to-front. As with the Kirsch email, I had paused my writing in order to listen to my friend’s voice message. In it he declined the invitation to a local health event I’d sent him the previous day. He described that he doesn’t want to be seen with me in public anymore because, after our last synchronistic meeting — the one that prompted this essay and is elaborated below — he is convinced that he sees the truth of me as good intentioned while being fully blind to my being hurtful to others. He acknowledged that even though he knows that he has to accept me for the way that I am he has decided that he has to avoid being associated with my kind of blindness in the way(s) I hurt others because it is too hurtful to him. (My paraphrase and with possibly some misunderstanding.)
At the same time he gave me an option of meeting with him so he could tell me, I think — it wasn’t quite clear to me — how I had hurt him by how I think I am helping others when it is his perception that in reality I am hurting others. (And in an amusing way, even that qualifies as a small synchronicity because at the men’s meeting a few days earlier I spent considerable time with the men examining me for the ‘error of my failed ‘congruence’ between persona and soul and how hurtful that is to them.)
After I considered his request, my ego-mind is fine with meeting him. However, for whatever ‘intuitive’ or possibly synchronistic reason, or even future synchronistic reason, my muscle testing process has guided me to defer that meeting with him until some unknown time in the future.
He tried to soften his message by adding that he felt that the who that I am is natural and unpretentious, to paraphrase his words. And that genuinely I want to reduce suffering. Unfortunately the reality, in his opinion to the best of my uncertain understanding, is that to him my do-gooderism interactions with people do the opposite. He didn’t specify if that was only on occasion or not! And each time I read that I laugh, for some reason.
What he likely doesn’t know is that with me I am very slow to befriend people — it is a kind of sacred bond to me — and thus I have very few people I call friends by my definition. And with that I am also very slow to end friendships. Estrangement is not, typically, enough to do that. I am curious to see how our relationship evolves!
And I also smile at all that, a little, because of course it was that kind of interactive ‘being’ that he claims I am that had engaged our friendship initially! And, eventually, it was also that which appears to have hurt him in the way he describes. Verbal communication is challenging and evolves unexpectedly.
The question I can ask is to what extent is he projecting on to me his own feeling of discomfort because of my having ipecacked him in 2023 when I failed to see beneath his spiritual experience that he was not in a place to understand my argument. Together, he and I, had bullied him, unintentionally, exactly as he describes. What he likely doesn’t see is that he had participated in that bullying because of his own inability to say ‘No’ and with my failure to see that inability in him. It is entirely a shared experience. (Tiny synchronicity intercession: the next day another friend shared with me one of his favourite musical groups and that he would love to, one day, sing to me one of their simple songs — and in fact he did indeed do just that:
And with that, with this realisation: how many others have I participated in hurting by having failed to see who they really are when I have entered into the time-warp of the ‘have-to-discourse’ or other unseen-by-me slime-fest encounters? Hmmmm. Time to dust off the personal responsibility prayer of Ho’oponopono.
In September 2024 he had called ‘uncle’ to our friendship. A time-out of unstated duration. The reasons he gave at the time were vague to me, something about how my presence was hurting him, that I wasn’t respecting him in some way that wasn’t clear to me. He began the estrangement about six weeks after my pacemaker surgery in July. He mentioned that his experience of me, when the bradycardia took me to pre-surgery near-death, as having traumatised him deeply and that that trauma had an important place in how he was feeling conflicted about me, about my behaviour.
On Christmas Day he ended the estrangement with a call to me. Our discussion was amicable and very much like all those that we’d had before. We agreed to reconnect, which we did in early January, that now fateful day when The Four Agreements synchronicity fired itself up in our presence. It is remarkable that his last message in January — the one described above — came at exactly the right time in this essay to significantly help me to see into my self so much more deeply and clearly than if he hadn’t left that message. An incredibly subtle synchronicity. Thank you, the learning just keeps on learning! (Tiny synchronicity intercession: Just before I sat to read this for the audio by chance I read an old message that for some reason pulled itself into the present:
The Germans say "Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst". I believe it means ‘Everything through which you are bettered is true.’
End of synchronicity intercession.)
The details of that Four Agreements synchronicity event, that which got this started between my friend’s messages invoking from him silence, are actually disclosed coherently a bit later in this essay.
End of that Double (now quadruple sub-)Synchronicity Insert Alert! Return to Regular Unending Synchronicity Narrative.
When Is Telling Another Person About Bully Language the Act of the Bully? To the Social Justice Activists, the Answer is ‘Every Time’
It has been stated to me by these three people only, so far, that even my asking the question ‘may I point out to you how you have a habit of language that is hurtful to you?’ is itself a brutal form of bully language. I have inferred from their reactions that for them it is a niceness trap, that they get caught out on their own ideological petard because they seem be referring to themselves when they argue that most people will feel obligated to, that they have to, be polite and lie to my face and themselves and say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’.
And, as discussed above, while they may not actually dismiss my request out of politeness they do not, perhaps even can not, hear the ‘… hurtful to themselves’ part of my discourse. The activist energy deflects from self to outside self and that deflection may land on me, as it did recently; or it may float around/ above them like it did with my friend who came to see me as being hurtful to others.
And now I am again laughing because most of these people will be, likely, in some kind of yogic or spiritual or activist by-passing state: when I ask them they will superficially react that they want to know how they can be improved. And this will be especially true if they are social warriors who really are, typically, the most deaf to criticism while, at the same time, being intellectually aware of the importance of being seen to be open hearted. The reality is, though, that their hearts are closed, truth is absolute with firm morality well ensconced if not entrenched and so they are effectively deaf, dumb and blind.
That state sometimes/ oftentimes hides itself behind ostentatious virtue signalling practices that have become increasingly popular since the rise of new age’s denialism of life-as-it-is ethos — the delusion that think-word-talk is more powerful than somatic reality and experience. A good and interesting example of that has been the over-the-top virtue signalling American Democratic Party for at least a couple of decades — their new age’s denialism was trumped! And it was with that new age nihilism that the like-minded extreme marxist progressive left transhuman activist ideology found a place to grow into such lunacy as the normalisation of the importance of the critical theories of: black-lives-matter as non-sexist-racism by teaching anti-white-male hatred; exposing grade-school children to homosexual pornography by trannies as sex education; hormonally and psychologically castrating children and adolescents to desexualise them as a utopian dysphoria-fix; crowing proudly that subjecting pre-age-of-consent humans to physical castration and genital mutilation is an epitome of life enhancing dysphoria treatment!
At first I thought there was some truth in that argument — that my asking to help someone is a subtle form of bullying. This essay changed that and I no longer accept it. It is a false argument.
The turning point of my awareness was when, with this essay, I examined a recent encounter with the full blown suicide threatening activist mentioned above. He complained that I had usurped his activist tribe by including inappropriate language and subject matters — ideas beyond my impeccable language argument. He expressed himself by whining like the most obnoxiously spoiled four year old it is possible to imagine. And that included resorting to a near-infantile tantrum state topped off by sniffling out with near-tears that it would be best if he killed himself. Twice. All this appalling victim language came with seeming ‘natural’ practiced ease from what looks like a fifty year plus old simulacrum of an adult human. He made it clear that I was the source of his existential crisis because his tribe hadn’t removed me from the group. And with that failure he no longer had the respect he felt he deserved. I’ve rarely seen such a gag-worthy emotional manipulative response anywhere, even by horrifically damaged children or from my mother’s narcissistic brilliance. He may have epitomised every worst aspect of the marxist extreme progressive-left being married to nihilistic malevolent new age-style reality denying narcissism.
Does my writing that description make me a bully?! [Palm-to-face with another Homer ‘Doh d’oh do-si-do!’]
No.
With these investigations into my role as the bully scapegoat with my friend and with my enemy, I see that for the other to be bullied by me requires that the other has already been actively bullying themselves. And, importantly, that they are reluctantly or contentedly or even happily blindly dependent in the narrative-prison of the should-whipped and the have-to beaten victim of being the virtuous and morally good citizen as hateful activist doing the necessary and disgusting work of removing both the undeserving creators of evil in a morally degenerate world, and their vile manifestations.
Or…
Am I Really A Bully Activist Warrior with Good Intentions? How to Know, Because To See Our True Selves is So Effing Hard!? Avidya, Everyone?
Can it be true that I am unconsciously bullying my way through life with good intentions?! Of course! And with that ‘of course’ I have done the PS-RAP (Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process) that says that that is not the case — this time, in this situation. How to know that that process is not itself also fraught with self-serving delusion? After all, how can I trust my body as a reliable authority?
And what about those ‘just’ coincidental so-called synchronicities? How can I trust them, even with their frequency and the intelligent humour of their pointed and astute nature?
Delusion knows no bounds, after all, and is always the other person’s problem!
Who am I, really? Am I my perception of self or am I the self that others perceive me to be? Or something outside that supposed dialectic, a mongrel of the two or even beyond that, something akin to nature being expressed as a living human alive in life much like a tree frog catching flies or an inexperienced buzzard eyeing that venomous frog as a mid-meal snack?
At some point I will re-check that with the ever independent I Ching later. Or maybe a friend’s Tarot or other tool of synchronicity interrogation. Until then…
Bully Reaction as Measure of Bully Culture?
It came to me that their feeling of being verbally bullied by my having asked that question is actually a significant measure of the extent that we are living in a deeply embedded and pernicious bully culture: simple questions are tangibly felt actions of word-violence that can moralistically justify as reasonable a wide range of morality driven responses starting with unconscious dissociative lying all the way to threats of suicide or homicide with only pronouns! And even being able to think such things presupposes the validity of idiotic extreme marxist progressive left transhuman activist ideological language that weaponises words as if they are literal swords and not signs or metaphors.
Absolutely words are powerful! Mesmerising and dangerous when non-impeccably used as tools of propaganda and for the casting of black spells. How many billions of people rolled up their sleeves to be injected with an inadequately and incompletely tested noxious olio of unknown chemicals, efficacy and side effects? Yet of themselves, literate or oral, words are not swords to cut our flesh nor are they poisoned needles that puncture it. They can at worst imprison our minds as separate from life, and at best liberate them into seeing as true what is true and as false what is false: we are expressions of life, not undeserving abominations destroying life who, as Scrooge bluntly put it ‘If [the misery of their destitution is such that they] would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ (P11, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 1843, with his cleverly embedded jab at the Malthusian belief in excess population and its fix mid-19th century. That woman who wished the death of the population is not a new phenomenon: there has been a long history of that before her.)
And the second way that I came to understand how asking that question as bully-language is a false argument — or perhaps a specific expression of being alive in the bully culture — is that the person who has reactively/ involuntarily said ‘yes’ to such a question is likely spell bound under a form of unconsciously motivated be nice ‘have to-ism’. When someone is being compulsively forced to be nice that ‘nice’ is in reality expressing a bully having disguised him or herself as a virtue signalling activist in some way. That has been my experience, anyway, in recent years since spending time with activist yogic and food virtue signalling do-gooders under the stress of the propagandised convid.
That still begs the question, though: to what extent am I one of those?! An I Ching answer?
After Several Days the ‘Later’ Came: I Ching Result from 2025.01.27 In The Afternoon: Setting the Stage
Hola, Sage. I appreciate that you have an open door policy and are here for me to consult. How do I know that I am seeing true, that I am not blinded by my own positive shadow projections that are keeping me in delusion of my enacting, unconsciously, verbal bully practices? A suggestion to my being an unconscious bully is, of course, my intense interest in it! We see in the world that which we are energising, or are being energised by from that which is within our selves! Yikes!
Synchronicity Event Interpenetates A Tarot Perambulation into the Cognisant Fool, the Fooled Cognition and Back Again
From a friend in an email earlier tonight before I edited this casting result:
Anything of which we are cognisant has a relative vibration within ourselves. One who is quick to see and judge evil in other persons has the seed of that evil within him or her self. The God-like person of pure and high vibrational tone is always aware of the God-spark in all s/he contacts, and his/her magnetic soul-vibration draws to greater intensity that vibrational force in those who come within his/her vibrational range. — Attributed on the internet to Paramahansa Yogananda from "SRF Lessons". However, I did not find that quotation on two web-pages with extensive Yogananda resources and references: Self Realisation Fellowship; and Yogoda Satsanga Society of India. (My emphasis and slight edit.)
“Anything of which we are cognisant has a relative vibration within ourselves.” Would this not be at play within the mens group and that group-relationship as well as the dynamic of the individual relationships we are experiencing and expressing therein? Interesting, because that got me thinking about the sadness I felt near the end of the group meet. When I was asked if the sadness I felt was for my own feeling of having failed to communicate joy with the group members, that felt to me to be only partially true. And my body-awareness process confirmed that feeling later in the evening and then again the next day. My ‘communication failure of self to others’ wasn’t the sole source of the sadness I had felt. With this re-look at that I experienced an ‘aha’ that a part of my feeling of sadness was my sensing it from someone or others within the group — although not everyone there was sad. ‘Yes,’ my body concurred.
And there is the whole issue of how echoing is a problem. And that the Universe, whatever that is, participates in that echo-effect as a feedback mechanism that will take us into complete nihilistic madness when we are failing to understand that the echoing is less about confirming the truth of our existence than it is a means of seeing how we are limiting our vision, perspective and/or thinking practices. The emphasis that echoing provides — and which can become instead, a true feedback loop that amplifies upon ourselves our own lunatic trends — is an aid toward vidya, seeing our true selves in somatic experience.
As mentioned in my essay, Sage, it is logically sound to question the independence of muscle testing as potentially a self-serving agent using ego-based echo reinforcement. To be clear, in my experience, my body-contact communication has been independent of my thoughts and ideas and beliefs of what I think is true, right, correct or the straight path forward. So, while it is a logically sound argument — an argument of the mind and so is severely limited by ego-mind’s devilishly self-serving reason embodied in our egoism, morals and ethics — experientially that argument hasn’t held true for me. Although often the outcome hasn’t been what my imagination had provided me with and has been frequently a crooked path. And somehow those surprises, way more often than not, have been much bigger, better, richer and more fun than my imagination held even when they may have initially included some kinds of discomfort, distress and difficulty. And the experiential truth of that for me became especially valid with the initiation of project convid that was the rationalised poisoning of humanity while removing for our own social good our freedoms of speech, movement and family gathering.
And a similar logical argument can be made about synchronicities. The logic around them eventually falls onto their own fallacies of the origination of cause and effect. Quantum entanglement and Gautama’s dependent co-arising are not, like logic, limited by the manifestations of logic because they infer the manifestation that predates the conditions under which logic can be valid. Logic is born out from these mysteries, their inconceivable libido. That is the mystery that remains a mystery while, at the same, being the pre-requisite on which logic depends for its initiation out from the inchoate boundary-condition that separates rational argument from mystery.
And my experience with synchronicities is that they are often illogical, funny and point out to me, when I attend them well, the times when my movement of body-mind is or is not aligned with the Universe’s humorous intelligent directions. Sometimes I misunderstand or improperly see what is or is not true! And often there is a time delay element to them, that on occasion has taken more than a year for the synchronicity’s veracity to be affirmed. And, Sage, this essay is an example of one of those long time-span synchronicities! Fascinating stuff!
So, Sage, I have confidence in my own processes of engagement with life — PS-RAP and synchronicity — and you. Well, it is all connected, though, of course! Together you are the trio that might be close to Gautama’s death-bed direction to Ananda: ‘Trust your Self.’ And at the same time, it is sound for me to sound out how sound my hearing and seeing is against the reality of life’s intelligent fractal, or ‘fractalacious’ irrationality. To be able to distinguish when confidence becomes hubris is not a small thing. So, if three times is the charm, and I’ve been flush with affirming synchronicities in writing and with outside encounters, and my PS-RAP has been consistent, then you are the third doorway to vidya of self.
As Jung put it brilliantly, the unconscious really is unconscious! So am I on a fool’s errand, walking the beach of my unconsciousness’s liminal space, looking for signs of life, my life? Am I the Arcane Fool looking into the heavens, walking off the edge of the cliff where my somatic awareness steps. Is my apparent joy simply my being blissfully unaware that as I dream of esoteric knowledge I’ve read only in books that I fail to heed the barking dog’s wise warning of an up-coming cliff-fall into reality?
Or is the dog simply excited that the book-fool is about to fall into new experience, something real and not an idea flying too close to the sun? Is it, as a new friend suggested, that this life-thing is a kind of practical joke, at which the dog is laughing? [Headshake followed by face-palm. Although, no ‘d’ho doh’ this time.]
Well, at least it is a narrative that gives me and others around me — although perhaps not the mens group so much — feelings of humour, laughter, lightness and of being more alive as an active participant in life, rather than its victim. Now, where’s the surf board on which I would learn to pop-up?
Return to Sage and My Question is Formulated and Asked
Sage, Duke of Chou, King Wen, I come to you to clarify my position and activity as being that of a good-intentioned foolish and unconsciously hurtful verbal bully. There is no question in my mind that I have foolishly and unconsciously bullied in the past! Very clearly that was made manifest with my friend, as I elaborated in this essay. And that connects to the problem of my not seeing when the engagement is coming from a place where I’ve not been properly present as fully seeing and hearing the other or others. With group settings it is undoubtedly difficult to not effectively verbally bully someone when presenting ideas of change through personal responsibility — as Jung cautioned, group and true individuation into individuality do not easily co-exist, if they do at all. And yet, as I discovered with this essay and with questioning my friends and acquaintances while editing and re-writing it, my ‘status’ as bully, verbal or otherwise, is not independent of the other’s state of being comprised of bully energy: either as activist hatred bully energy looking to create victims or by taking on the role of the victim!
As I explored in this essay, I now recognise that to bully is actually slightly incorrect. For there to be bullying there is required the victim, the bullied. Bullying is a partnered relationship, a kind of codependency or elaborate dance of two or more in an odd way. So when my friend saw my engagement with the Mexicanos in early January he had engaged me coming from a place of energised victimhood, perhaps even as a victim resting in activist energy. And from that energy-space-time perhaps he perceived my relationship with the readers of Los Cuatro Acuerdos as being my verbal bully victims. I certainly didn’t feel that way and my subsequent continued exchanges with them, even today with the woman, might suggest that they didn’t feel bullied.
That argument can be seen as my equivocating, perhaps, a form of blaming the victim. And yet relationship, even one of victim-bully is a relationship, meaning that both bully and victim do not exist in isolation from each other. To whatever extent I have misunderstood the other — which I’ve done frequently — that is because, typically, I’ve brought my own self into the relationship as a filter-amplifier of my own shadow/ samskara practices and structures. I failed to be with vidya, to see as true what is in experiential reality true and to see as false what is in experiential reality false — at that moment of potential relationship beyond competing nihilist monologues.
So, the question, to you Sage: how to phrase this? Sage, when I engage people in conversations of personal responsibility — such as with the Mexicanos when my friend stood aside and with something akin to distress watched me — and which for me are often related to removing victimising, schismogenetic language and/ or living the yamas and niyamas, am I doing so with the energy of the bully? Now, I understand that my energy and enthusiasm can be mistaken for bullying! Coming on too strong with unbalanced brahmacharya. (I’m working on that!) And that is not what I’m asking. Enthusiasm and unbalanced energy is not bullying although I now see that to someone in victim mentality they may, or even likely will, experience my energy as being that of a bully — that is their base-interaction to conversation and relationships. So, my question: Is my engagement with people coming from a place of bully energy with an unconscious intention to be hurtful. That I am being a hypocrite and that my consciously spoken words to be free of bully language is in direct contradiction to my unconscious intention of bullying the other into compliance with a convincing argument? [Pause to complete yarrow stalk casting-meditation with dulled bamboo cooking skewers.]
Casting Result: 15. Modesty Becomes 2. The Receptive
Now that is interesting! Even the names themselves, independent of each other, suggest that my svadhyaya effort here — my self examination/ study — is not coming from the place of the bully! And not constriction and superiority is even more powerfully expressed. And it aligns with previous castings . As a pair, that overall meaning of openness and equality, not constriction and superiority, is even more powerfully expressed. And it aligns with previous castings that have been strongly directing me to continue expressing my ways and means even more actively with my living community. So now, I can unscrupulously let my ego self puff up with self-aggrandisement powered by the wisdom of the I Ching: it likes me, it really likes me! It wants me to continue on and to do more! [More laughter.] Hello Mara, the ego of clever smallification energies and languages hiding behind false pride! This time, I see you. You aren’t required in this situation to protect me. I am safe here, so please go back to your nap or playing your favourite game of solitaire.
For brevity, I will not cite the texts extensively. Instead, here are the links to the translations done by Baynes/ Wilhelm: 15. Ch'ien/Modesty that becomes 2. K’un/ The Receptive. Here are extracts from the opening comment of each hexagram to give you a taste:
From Modesty:
The mountain [trigram is] … the representative of heaven and earth. It dispenses the blessings of heaven, the clouds and rain that gather round its summit, and thereafter shines forth radiant with heavenly light. This shows what modesty is and how it functions in great and strong men.
The moving line, 9 in the 3rd place:
A superior man of modesty and merit
Carries things to conclusion.
Good fortune.From The Receptive:
The attribute of the Receptive is devotion; its image is the earth. It is the perfect complement of the Creative — the complement, not the opposite, for the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as against time, the female-maternal as against the male-paternal. And as applied to human affairs, the principle of this complementary relationship is found in the relations between man and woman, and in those between prince and minister and between father and son. Indeed, even in the individual this duality appears in the coexistence of the spiritual world and the world of the senses.
My Comments And Yet More Synchronicity
I cast this on the day before of the next men’s meeting. That meeting recommenced with a very intense questioning of the truth of my being, to investigate more deeply my lack of what the leader calls ‘congruence’ in me — an incongruent set of questionings because each of the querents had a significantly different perception of my lack: I talked too easily with a polish that automatically precluded my being truthful and honest; I was too elaborate and esoteric with my words to be worth listening to; and I made excess glib, easy references to my knowledge and that naturally discounted my having had an actual lived experience.
And it is significant that hexagram fifteen came up this time because it came up when I did a casting for my last ‘Dear Claude’ epistle to my dead father last fall. That time I elaborated on the casting by including a tobacco ceremony to acknowledge and honour the dead; and to smudge out negative spirits from my cabaña. So, the same hexagram twice in three castings is statistically significantly rare; although, from experience, when I have been in a particular energy-space the same hexagram will often appear, in total defiance to randomness. For my dead father’s casting, see
The Pain Of Anger In The Hip Hops Over to a Montaignesque Synchronicity Blitz, a Foray of Fauré Balls.
In that casting my focus was on ‘ghosts and spirits’ in part because it was done on the day of the dead here in Oaxaca: “It is the way of ghosts and spirits to ravage excess and enrich humility, the way of people to despise excess and love humility.” That was from the Hinton translation: references to ghosts is inferred in the Baynes/ Wilhelm translation. Both refer to being humble as proper.
Is the casting cautioning me against being an arrogant bully with my ‘have to discourse’? Or that my ‘have to discourse’ is being done with an appropriate eccentric humility? Yet again this comes back to how to see true as true and false as false. How to trust what we see?
The mens group expressed their opinions that, in different ways, I was excessive in my ‘way’ with words. As did my friend. Yet, I do not read that from either the structure or the language of the two hexagrams. Neither one of them is saying that I am in excess. Rather both suggest that I am acting from a place of humility and that I am doing so in a manner that creates the path to success. ‘… the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it.’ And
This seems to be pretty clear language! And I hope that I am not gulling myself as Malvolio did when he read the forged letter with its obtuse and abstruse allusions that shortly thereafter jigged him into the mad house!
[Malvolio:] Daylight and champian discovers not more! This is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-devise the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me; for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me (Twelfth Night, 2.5.164-169). ...
[Malvolio:] I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark. [Feste:] Madman, thou errest. I say there is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog. [Malvolio:] I say this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance were as dark as hell. And I say there was never man thus abused. I am no more mad than you are. Make the trial of it in any constant question (Twelfth Night 4.2.42-51).
More On Joy and Its Source Obscurity and Manifestation
The leader of the mens group cautioned against my claim of feeling joyful. That joy is difficult and that my feeling it when the other men clearly do not may mean that I am stealing their joy! Really? That caught me a bit by surprise and after the surprise fell away I had the funniest thought. Well, two thoughts. The first is that at its core joy really is a problematic feeling/ emotion! He was right. And since then I’ve stopped using it. The second was that my experience of joy is absolutely not transferable and that what I may have considered joy a few years ago will not be what I may consider joy to be a few years from now. Okay, once I had relaxed with these thoughts, there popped into my imagination a great aha! I thought it was, and is, funny, and pointed because it playfully riffs of the first line of the first verse/ chapter of The Tao Te Ching. And when I looked that up to confirm my memory, the play on words was easily extended. Here is me, again, throwing caution to the wind and riffing like some ne’er-do-well piece of raff from an irreverent riff, on a wise man’s text:
The joy that can be told Is not the eternal Joy. ... Yet mystery and joy Arise from the same source. This source may be called Joy Because, joy within Joy, Points to full understanding — (my riff of verse/ ch 1 of the Tao Te Ching, played off of Stephen Mitchell's translation. For other translations see Lao Tzu's Tao-Teh-Ching: A Parallel Translation Collection compiled by B. Boisen)
Even though I came up with the first line ‘The joy that can be named is not the true Joy’ before the meet ended, and a part of me really wanted to speak it at that time, I restrained my self for the rest of the meeting and left without sharing that aha. To share it felt like it would have been, somehow, an inappropriate eccentric action. So then when I remembered Pirsig’s riff, a little bt later, I was practically rolling on the floor with laughter while keeping my best straight-face in the group: ‘The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality’ (p. 248 Zen in the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, Bantam).
As I explored this I saw that this tied in rather intriguingly with the Hinton translation: ‘When Humility is lofty and revered, it is radiant; when it's low and unnoticed, there's no violating it.’ This has me laughing because it would seem that what ever it is that I am at this time, it isn’t radiating humility! Because my presence with the group, or so my leader says, is comfortable so long as I’m listening, not speaking. And at the same time my presence is noticed as a positive thing. Perhaps this is the lack of congruence that he feels: ‘that the quality (of yogic equanimity) that I have isn’t the real Quality (of Yogic Equanimity)’.
Teacher and/or Student? Is There A Difference, Really?
It took my friend about a year before his suppressed reactivity reaction to having bullied himself using my words blew up with that long texted excoriation of me as having unfairly hurt him. As noted already, he had no recollection of my having asked him if it was okay for me to share with him my concern about how he was hurtfully lie-spelling himself. Nor that he had agreed that it was okay for me to tell him whenever he was unconsciously reiterating those black spells of ‘have to’ and ‘should’.
It turns out that I was not his teacher. He was, in a real sense, a teacher to me of the importance of my being aware of whether or not the person with whom I am sharing this knowledge is in a place of being able to digest my carefully articulated ‘wisdom’. Or if my ideas, wise or not, are or would become an ipecac or a slow acting indigestible word-toxin or parasitic brain-worm. Since his blow-up I have been ‘bullied’ by two other people for having been, in their opinion, the purveyor to them of bully language. One from my substack writing and the other after a group oral presentation. And what these three are making clear is how important it is for me to have sufficient empathy to determine their level or depth of what E.F. Schumacher describes, in A Guide for the Perplexed, as ‘adaequatio’ which, in the language of Ayurveda means being ready and able to digest information and/or experiences.
Short Aside to Include Schumacher’s ‘Map’ or ‘Guide’ to Assist Us To Live Well. Here is His Introduction to the Concept of Adaequatio
My map or guidebook is constructed on the recognition of four Great Truths — landmarks, as it were — which are so prominent, so all-pervading, that you can see them wherever you happen to be; and if you know them well, you can always find your location by them, and if you cannot recognise them, you are lost. The guidebook, it might be said, is about 'Man lives in the world'. This simple statement indicates that we shall study:
1. 'The World';
2. 'Man' - his equipment wherewith to meet 'the World';
3. His way of learning about the world; and
4. What it means to 'live' in this world.
The Great Truth about the world is that it is a hierarchical structure of at least four great Levels of Being.
The Great Truth about man's equipment wherewith to meet the world is the principle of 'adequateness' (adaequatio).
The Great Truth about man's learning relates to the 'Four Fields of Knowledge'.
The Great Truth about living this life, living in this world, relates to the distinction between two types of problem, 'convergent' and 'divergent'.
A map or guidebook, let this be understood as clearly as possible, does not 'solve' problems and does not 'explain' mysteries; it merely helps to identify them. Thereafter, everybody's task is as defined by the last words spoken by the Buddha: 'Work out your [own] salvation with diligence§.' (My emphasis.)
§The translation that yogi-buddhist scholar Michael Stone cites as being Gautama’s last words is ‘trust yourself’. See Stone’s beautiful and very interesting podcast Best of Awake in the World: Buddha’s Last Words.
Or on Soundcloud:
Schumacher continues:
For this purpose, according to the precepts of the Tibetan teachers;
a philosophy comprehensive enough to embrace the whole of knowledge is indispensable; a system of meditation which will produce the power of concentrating the mind on anything whatsoever is indispensable; an art of living which will enable one to utilise each activity (of body, speech and mind) as an aid on the Path is indispensable (EF Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p16-17).
So, the question of adaequatio is twofold: is my perception of truth spacious enough to be adequate to engage life with appropriate eccentric action? Patañjali’s principles of the kleshas includes that at the deepest level. And is my awareness adequate to receive from experience with appropriate eccentricity what is to be learned by it? Patañjali’s principles of the yamas and the niyamas address that.
Fractal-Like, Number Four Comes Full and Fully the Unsquared Circle Back and I Learn Something of My Verbal Inadequacy as Part of The Inadequacy of the Four Agreements Synchronicity
In the above I’ve told, in a broken, disjointed, piecemeal and an incomplete and scattered way the Four Agreements synchronicity story of my friend and I. Recap for coherence: we met, we talked, I inadequately shared my ‘have to lecture’ with him. He in turn inadequately received it, and, despite that, we became friends. About a year later ‘have to’ and ‘should’ were vomited back at me from him. About six months after that he broke off our relationship for reasons relating to some aspect of my behaviour that felt toxic to him in a way that I do not clearly understand. His seeing in me bully or bully-like behaviour, maybe? Not sure.
About three months after that he resumed contact and we arranged to meet in early January this year.
It was for that meeting that the delightful synchronicity theatre director stepped in and returned to both of us The Four Agreements. With it I revisited my forgotten review within which I had describe how badly done is Ruiz’s advocacy of ‘impeccable language’ because it is rife with ‘have to’ and ‘should.’
The subtle details of that live-action synchronicity theatre presentation suggests to me that my ideas of the importance of impeccable language are fundamentally correct. And beyond that it created in me this intensive follow up to the experienced synchronicity this complex and deeply revealing/ purging svadhyaya practice of self exploration. In that the synchronicity has engendered/ revealed in me with this essay so much more self awareness and more deeply the questioning of what is true and not, it has also become an extremely powerful example of the student teaching the teacher. And that that synchronicity event provided me with the impetus and pathway by which I found my way into some of my most subtle hypocrisies and incongruences. That awareness, that vidya, gives me the choice and opportunity to depotentiate and then release them.
And at the same time, my friend was reintroduced to my ‘have to lecture’ through an astonishing hypocritical and lie-spell language failure by a respected and multi-million book selling self-help guru, Miguel Ruiz. This time it wasn’t my message of impeccable language and its emphasis on extirpating ‘have to’! Great! This time I was, with synchronicity, only the messenger of that respected best selling author, one that my friend had experienced in his past and, like most of its readers, was not able to find from it his path to freedom.
The synchronicity’s the thing, to catch having to as hidden in your words lying.
A few more devilishly funny details to flesh out the synchronicity: my friend’s diet was vegan at the time and since he lives in el centro, I asked him to pick the eatery. We would eat an early lunch to give us time to talk before my late afternoon check-in with the government. He sent me the link. Normally I would not have entered, or even considered it because it is a hotel restaurant. In general I find them far below par. To my surprise my PS-RAP gave me the thumbs and I arrived a bit early in the afternoon. There were no other customers. I sat at a table facing the door and watched two young Mexicanos come in and sit down. They saw me alone, greeted me and, after a few pleasantries in Spanish, asked if I would like to join them. I explained that my friend was coming, and so perhaps later we would.
Very shortly thereafter my friend arrived. We greeted each other warmly and after a few pleasantries, learned that the restaurant sold only meat-based meals. So, now my body said ‘No’ to the food, as it has since 2014 to keep me vegetarian despite having said ‘Yes’ a couple of hours earlier to going there. He, being vegan by ideology, rejected the food as well. Curiosity now kicks in: why did my body agree to go there, if not to eat and talk with my friend?
On the way out I paused at the the table with the Mexicanos to explain we were leaving. I noticed a new copy of Los Cuatro Acuerdos on the table. (I was so happy my Spanish is good enough now to read that!) I asked Ismael — after we introduced ourselves — about the book. He liked it and had bought it for his sister, Praxedis, to read. She was the other Mexicana with him. I explained that I read it many years ago, and that the principles were good and that the actual quality of the writing was very bad. Because of that failure in quality I consider that book to be a poor guide to personal freedom. It was a fun conversation, lively with me bumbling happily and crudely with Spanish. All the while my friend stood back and did not participate at all despite his Spanish being at least on par with mine, although likely it is better because he has been studying far longer.
Before we left I asked Ismael if he would be interested in reading the book review I wrote. He said he would, and so we exchanged numbers. I told him I’d send it later after I had translated it into Spanish.
My friend and I went to another place, of his choosing again. A really great small new-to-me Italian restaurant. The food was excellent and I really enjoyed our conversation. It was nice to catch and for me to see that his health seemed better than the last time we had been together.
At some point we talked very briefly about The Four Agreements. Yes, he had read it many years ago and thought it was a good book at the time. And, like most of the people I’ve asked about it, he doesn’t remember what it was specifically that he liked about or what he might have got from it. He didn’t remember what the four agreements were.
We parted on good terms. Well, that’s what I thought.
That evening I dug up my review of The Four Agreements on Goodreads and then used Google Translate to translate it into español. After some tweaks I sent it to Ismael. Shortly after that my friend called me up, like the old days. We had a short conversation, during which I told him that I had just sent my book review to the Mexicano we had encountered in the hotel restaurant. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s interesting. Would you send it to me too, please?’ I was surprised, and said ‘Sure’. And then I did. About ten minutes later I received his terse DM: ‘That’s very interesting.’ Nothing more. From the review, here are the juicy bits he would have read:
… [Ruiz] closes with an extended allegory about the parasitical nature of our belief system. I saw no need to extend it, and even without the repetitions it ended what was basically an upbeat book with a kind of threatening negative tone.
I highlight threatening because the book is far weaker than it could have been by being too repetitious and, more importantly and subtly, because he failed to apply the first rule to his own writing in this book. Throughout the book he tells us what we have to do. I realised many years ago that the use of have to is bully language. It is the bully who tells people what they have to do. In this Ruiz is, with ostensible kindness, being a bullying grandfather in a way. It works against the purpose of the book. Perhaps the best example of why this book is likeable, but not worth 4 stars, occurs beautifully on page 81:
“When you do your best you learn to accept yourself. But you have to be aware and learn from your mistakes.
...
If you take action because you have to, then there is no way you are going to do your best. Then it is better not to do it.”
Yes, I may be overly fussy, but what is the meaning of 'impeccable'?! I have been practicing speech and action without using have to and should, and the practice has been powerful and liberating. And it has been a more impeccable manifestation and expression of being impeccable with my language than when I used them in my past (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom — Guy’s review).
The next day my friend once again called off our relationship, again citing something about how my behaviour was toxic and that, while he struggles to straighten out his health, it is better for him to avoid being around me. Again he added that he would be happy to meet with me and tell me what his ideas are that would make me less toxic. For whatever reason, my PS-RAP has, at least up until now, declined his offer.
The synchronicity — bare bones: I shared with a stranger who would become an important friend the malevolent disempowering nature of ‘have to’ and ‘should’. In response he lied at least once, and said he understood and accepted the importance of the practice of that concept. With a year-long delayed and angry reaction he rejected it — rejected, in a way, his lie to me. About a year after that, by a chance encounter and after a three month separation, we meet in a hotel restaurant. We rejected the meat-based meal and after not eating anything we encounter strangers from whom we re-discover The Four Agreements. That night, and out of the blue, he asks to see my review — only after I told him that I had shared it with the Mexicano stranger we had met earlier that day at the restaurant where there was no food for us to eat. He finds my review ‘very interesting’. And the following day calls me too toxic to be around while he concentrates on finding someone or something that can heal his serious physical health challenges. He asked me if I would like him to tell me what he sees in me as a behaviour I have that is hurting other people. My body directs me to say ‘No.’ He asks us to enter another communication timeout for an undetermined duration.
By Their Exceptions Are the Rules Proved — I Meet Isaiah and Paulina
The synchronicity and the melodrama and the amazing sense of humour I felt in all this directed me with some force to begin to write about it. And it became, if you are reading still, unfashionably long. At the time I started writing this I had imagined that it would be short and quick because, superficially, it looked relatively simple! And somehow it kept attracting synchronicities one after another, more ahas into the discovery of my hidden hypocrisies even as I criticised Ruiz for his! [smh.]
On the week that I got started on writing this essay I was sitting in a café that my body has me frequent. I’d already begun having some of my realisations, described above, beyond just the weird initial synchronicity. So this intended short essay kept getting longer and longer. And I decided that I wanted to do an actual poll of people’s experience of The Four Agreements. At my heart I really am bent towards scientific methods and didn’t think that the ‘poll’ of it being a used book store’s most frequently received book was adequate to make a scientifically sound conclusion. It was enough, for me, to generate an hypothesis worth exploring.
While stumbling around with these ideas I paused and noticed that my curiosity was pulling me strongly to ask the man sitting beside me if he had read Los Cuatro Acuerdos.’Si.’ ‘Did you find it helpful.’ ‘Si, mucho.’ Really? My first positive reaction!
In fact Isaiah was very familiar with Los Cuatro Acuerdos. He described how it came to him at a time when he was really struggling hard with relationships, family and work. It was very powerful and completely changed and improved everything in his life very much. And my conversation with him was pleasant and diverse and engaged: he seemed happy, focused and amiable while we explored a wide range of spiritual principles and ideas that included Christianity, Buddhism, Gautama Buddha and yoga. And he is a Pentecostal.
Exception number two happened a few days ago. I met Paulina and her boyfriend Jonathan. As I often do with people I meet, now, for my own undocumented polling purposes, I asked them if they have read Los Cuatro Acuerdos. (So far most people I’ve asked haven’t read it and of those most haven’t even heard of it.) Jonathon didn’t know it and she became then the second exception to proverbially prove the rule. Paulina remembered only one rule because it had had a profound upbeat effect in improving her life: don’t take what others say personally. She said that that agreement improved her life very much and that she is forever grateful for what that book gave her.
Conclusion! As Well As Lacking Impeccable Language With Too Many Words, The Four Agreements is a Near Perfect Spiritual By-Pass Book — Hence Its Market Popularity!
My impeccable language critical eye sees that Ruiz has, in a fun way and with simple language, declared how important it is that we are being 100 percent in our actions and intentions. Yes! Unfortunately he fails to direct us to be also 100 percent responsible for the entirety of our lives, even the shitty bits, the bits we don’t like, the shadows we deny or descry or project onto the officially designated morally underserving and dirty other.
Nor does he really address how to know that our efforts at 100 percent are appropriate. As discussed in this essay, it is very easy for that 100 percent effort to be directed hurtfully without the perpetrators seeing the malevolent or pernicious nature of the results of those good-intentioned activisms. (I think that my friend thinks that that is what I am doing.) Or how, when we are blaming and complaining, we are 100 percent keeping ourselves victimised by our own failure to be responsible in life for our own failures.
And beyond that Ruiz gives the readers the easy out from even wanting to look at our failures! When Ruiz wrote that we have to be 100 percent aware of our failures while also writing that we are not to do anything that we have to do, he is telling us how important it is for us not to learn! I’m sure that’s not his intention, of course. And yet his language clearly constructs that meaning, and the ego-mara part wanting us to stay small and fearful of personal responsibility will do a feel good snoopy dance into spiritual by-pass and making his book a best seller — and easily discarded later. In that way we create a self-help guru who tells us, in a convoluted by-passing way, that it is best to remain blind to the truth of who we are and to the consequences of what we do. So we are again being authorised to abdicate completely from becoming personally responsible for being alive in life.
For some reason the image this evoked in me was of playing Monopoly with an infinite set of Chance cards that allow us to by-pass Boardwalk and land on Go: we miss out on the reality of the full experience of the game of life.
At first I had a slightly more positive spin on this. When I stretched my imagination enough around my perceived intention of his words — while ignoring his actual words — it is possible for me to see a hidden inference that in Ruiz’s poor exhortation for us to be 100 percent committed to being aware of our failures that he was also directing us to be 100 percent responsible for the entirety of our life. It is from the failures that we learn the most, not the successes. So, yes! Hip hip hooray, callooh callay, oh frabjous day, because freedom really means to be 100 percent personally responsible!
However Ruiz immediately argues that it is better not to do anything you have to do. So, it could be that the good/ great feeling people get from the book is that it is by not doing the agreements that the most fundamental agreement is completed — which is to not do the agreements and thus with a guru’s directive revoke, still, with by-passing our greatest fear: to be personally responsible.
How come this contorted failure of impeccable language? By inference, Ruiz is living with and advocating the continuation of the lie of ‘have to’. Perhaps with some physical exceptions to keeping us living — food, water, evacuation of waste and other health practices — there isn’t anything we absolutely have to do: it is all choice. ‘The problem is choice,’ and every time we intone the lie-spell mantra ‘have to’ we revoke freedom and personal responsibility and invoke constriction and personal disempowerment and weakness.
The principles of the yamas and the kleshas of Patañjali, the eightfold path of Gautam Buddha, the twelve steps of AA, which are in turned derived from Carl Jung, all are grounded and successful because they understand the importance of truth as the cornerstone of how to live a life filled with enough happiness and compassion to reduce the suffering of others. However, we live in a society awash in lies, big lies such as the lies of conspiracies, or conspiracies as lies that pour into us via the various medias; and the small even more deadly lies we speak and hear thousands of times a day: ‘have to’ and ‘should’.
Thus in some ways, perhaps even in many ways, The Four Agreements is an epitome of a perfect spiritual by-pass book! And by looking at its failure more closely in this exploration, it has significantly helped me to see my own bully hypocrisies and spiritual by-passes. By this svadhyaya Ruiz opened the door to my being more spacious and powerful with my listening communication skills and perhaps with my spoken ones too. Thus I have gone against Ruiz’s ‘have to’ lie and learned from my failures! Gracias, Miguel Ruiz.
This was not at all the conclusion I was expecting when I began this essay almost three months ago. Who am I?
Thank you for reading.
Request for Financial Help
In July of 2024 I had unexpected pacemaker surgery that cleaned out my savings.
I requested donations to help me through the pinch. I had anticipated that my immediate threat of insolvency would be cleared before the end of the year. That did not happen as my residency status is continuing to protract seemingly interminably and I am legally disallowed from working until that is confirmed officially.
If you are in a position to help and would like to, you can check out the details of that in
Once my yoga based trauma recovery centre is given the green light, with confirmation of my residency, I anticipate the need for immediate financial help will disappear. As the situation changes I will update my requirements. At this time, I’m about 1/3 of what I anticipate is required. So if you are curious and would like to help me, please consider my request for donations and give an amount that gives you joy. I appreciate and am grateful for your consideration of me.
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All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
Song of the Essay
Zoë Keating — Don’t Worry
We are living the Bhagavad-gita wedded to the great apocalypse! All the best with what is changing. Everything changes! With peace, respect, love and equanimous enthusiasm.
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